


Strength

by ama



Series: Major Arcana [2]
Category: Death Note & Related Fandoms, Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Brothers, Crimes & Criminals, Dysfunctional Family, Family, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Oral Sex, POV Mello | Mihael Keehl, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recreational Drug Use, Roman Catholicism, Universe Alteration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-12 07:27:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16868680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ama/pseuds/ama
Summary: Mello is the eldest son. He has always been the stronger of the two, always bound to protect his brother, until their father dies and the competition between them becomes more urgent. Kira's head is his birthright, and he will do whatever it takes to win.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The second installment of an AU in which Mello and Near are L's sons, as Ohba and Obata initially considered. L is aged up by ten years and Mello by one, and any timeline wackiness this causes is pointedly ignored.
> 
> The title is inspired by the God's Eye tarot project, in which artist lawlietislaw drew [Mello as the Strength card.](http://lawlietislaw.tumblr.com/post/176596800173/strength-up-courage-patience-self-control)

_You have never been alone._

Mello turns these words over in his mind for hours. He can’t get them out of his head, not when he walks out of Wammy’s House for the last time, not when he gets on the plane, not when he gets off it. L won’t name Mello his successor because he’s never been alone, and apparently that has something to do with being a detective.

 _I_ _was_ _alone_ , he thinks resentfully. _For almost three years I was alone!_

But no matter how many times he thinks this, he knows that it’s not true. He can’t remember a time before Near was born. His very first memory is his brother’s baptism: the baby in a white gown, skin painted blue from the light filtered through stained glass windows, wailing so loudly that the priest’s words were drowned out. He doesn’t remember being held by anyone, but he must have been, because he has a clear memory of looking _down_ at the baby, and reaching out to clumsily pat his face and get him to stop crying.

Periodically throughout the flight, he glances at Near out of the corner of his eye. Lately he isn’t sure if he recognizes his little brother anymore. When they were kids, he was shy, affectionate, and easily impressed. Mello had always appreciated that. He spent most of his childhood being scared and hiding his fear from his brother, and Near’s simple devotion made it easier to bear. More recently, though, Near has turned—cold. It started with arrogance when he began to overtake Mello in their classes, and then it hardened into something else. For God’s sake, he didn’t even look up from his goddamn puzzle when he learned that L was dead. _If you can’t win the game, if you can’t beat the puzzle, you’re just a loser_. What the hell was _wrong_ with him?

It doesn’t matter, Mello thinks, slumping down in his seat. The only reason they’re on this flight together is because Near would probably be stuck in the UK forever if Mello hadn’t booked a ticket for him. Once they touch down, they will go their separate ways and Near won’t be his problem any more. He is not his brother’s keeper.

He glances at Near again and, seeing the other boy totally absorbed in a wooden puzzle block, steals a chocolate bar from the pile of snacks on the tray table in front of him.

“I was going to eat that,” Near says without looking up.

“Too fucking bad,” Mello snarls. He has a pair of headphones, and he slips them on and plays the music loud enough to block out any sound.

The plane lands an hour later. Mello’s initial plan is to grab his backpack, sprint off the plane, and disappear into the crowd, but he is hampered by the other passengers. He and Near walk out to the terminal together. And even then, Mello doesn’t run away just yet. He stands there, with his backpack hanging off his shoulder, and stares at Near for a long, quiet minute. Near stares back without saying a word.

Near has really never been alone. He’s never hailed a taxi, booked himself into a hotel room, bought a plane or train ticket. He’s never gone shopping for groceries or clothes, paid for the bill at a restaurant, scheduled a doctor’s appointment, or signed up for a fucking library card. Logically, Mello knows that Near has more than enough money to pay people to do this for him. If he can manage to get to a hotel room, he can probably get by with room service and the concierge’s assistance for the rest of his life. But...

“Don’t be an idiot,” Near says suddenly. “Don’t get killed by Kira.”

Mello rolls his eyes.

“I’m not going to get killed. I’m going to win.”

“Not if I win first,” Near says, grinning and playing with his hair, and no, Mello doesn’t feel bad in the slightest about abandoning him. Near is a smug little _asshole_ who is annoyingly good at everything, and he’ll be fine. Mello punches him in the arm and tells himself to turn around and walk away.

But he doesn’t. Near is standing there in a pair of white pajamas that are too big for him, with curls of hair falling into his face because he needs a haircut, clutching a blue plastic robot because apparently he has decided he’s too old for teddy bears… and he’s Mello’s _little brother_.

Mello reaches out and pulls Near into his arms. He squeezes him tightly and closes his eyes, and for a minute he is seven years old and things are—not easier, but simpler at least, and it’s still them against the world but _them_ feel like enough. He doesn’t expect Near to hug him back. He doesn’t push him away, and that’s as much as he can expect.

“Bye,” Mello says in a low voice.

He lets go and turns around quickly so he doesn’t have to see the expression on Near’s face. He takes a deep breath and releases it as he walks down the long hallway of the airport terminal. _Alone…_ he thinks. _See that, L? I’m alone now._

Mello has formally renounced his claim to the title of L, but that doesn’t really matter. He knows it, and Near knows it. He may not be the successor to the famous detective, but he is still his father’s son. A satisfied smile creases his face as he takes a chocolate bar from his pocket.

Kira’s head is his birthright, and he is going to claim it.

—

Mello goes to Chicago first. He wants to put some distance between himself and Near, and he wants to make his start in a large city where he can find allies… and he is a fifteen-year-old boy who wants to go home again, even if only for a little while. He goes back to their neighborhood and walks past the church on the corner, which hasn’t changed at all, to the old apartment building, which has changed a lot. He stands across the street and stares at the upper floors for a few minutes. It looks smaller than it did, and shabbier. There is graffiti on the sides, dirty curtains and broken shades in the windows.

The Japanese restaurant on the first floor is gone. Mello never intended to go up to the apartment, but he toyed with the idea of getting lunch here—maybe ordering takeout and getting someone else to pick it up, in case the old man might recognize him. But the restaurant has been replaced by a liquor store. He goes inside and finds a tiny shop crammed with shelves, and a cashier standing behind a plastic barrier with a rainbow quilt of lottery tickets behind him.

Mello takes a bottle off the closest shelf and brings it to the counter. The cashier looks at the bottle and then at Mello.

“Got an ID?” he asks.

“Do I look stupid?” Mello replies.

The cashier shrugs. After Japan, the United States has lost the highest number of criminals to Kira—and based on the look of this neighborhood, Mello isn’t the only person walking around under an alias and refusing to give out a picture ID. The fact that he’s well under twenty-one doesn’t seem to bother the cashier all that much.

(Belatedly, Mello remembers the photo that came with L’s letter. Did Near save it, or was it left behind for Roger to burn?)

“What happened to the old guy who was here before?” he asks.

“What, with the restaurant?”

“Yeah.”

“Moved back to Japan a couple of months ago. Apparently it’s a lot nicer there now.”

The only adult from his childhood that Mello actually liked, and he’s a goddamn Kira worshiper. That blows.

Mello spends the rest of the day circling the neighborhood, spiralling outwards, and talking to every person he finds sitting on the ground, on their stoop, or on a bench. Old people and homeless people especially, the ones who spend all day watching and listening. It turns out he’s bought a bottle of Jameson—he takes one sip himself, coughs, and swears off whiskey forever. Instead, he parcels the rest out to his informants, a shot at a time. He buys himself a pack of chocolate bars to keep his energy up, but he’s been eating Cadbury’s for almost eight years and can’t stand the texture of Hershey’s anymore, so he ends up giving a lot of that away, too.

He’s looking for a gang. A gang headed by someone with ambition and some brains, with a decent amount of capital and contacts in at least one other major city. Someone who’s doing well, but who could be doing a whole lot better. That first day, he only hears whispers. Names of people who hang out on corners, people flashing suspicious amounts of cash, nice boys who grew up and got a nasty look in their eyes. It’s not much to go on, but Mello uses half of his remaining cash to book a motel room for the night, and strikes out again the next morning.

Everything starts to pile up. Names. Locations. Crimes. He goes to a public library and hacks the local FBI office—he’s not as good as Matt, but it’s enough to confirm that the whispers are right. Rod Ross has a tight grip on Chicago, even with the crime rate down, and he’s smart enough to have eluded the authorities except for one dismissed possession charge. There are two notes in his file from the Las Vegas FBI office and one each from L.A. and Miami, but nothing serious. A big fish in a little pond, looking for a way upstream. Perfect.

The next few days are a matter of balance. Mello doesn’t have the cash to stay in a motel as long as he needs to, and he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself by stealing too much too quickly. He uses the last of his money on a switchblade and a sturdy leather jacket lined with fur, and from then on he sleeps on the streets.

Not that he sleeps much. He spends most of his time wandering, and watching. He begins to recognize some of the minor players in Ross’s gang, then some of the mid-levels. He follows them, sometimes, and eavesdrops, but never one person for too long. He doesn’t need to know much about them as individuals—he just needs to get the lay of the land.

In the early mornings, when no one’s around, he teaches himself to pick pockets and shoplift. It’s not that hard. All he needs to do is get a couple of bucks, and then he can go to a convenience store, walk around a while stuffing his pockets, and buy a candy bar on the way out to divert suspicion. Avoiding cameras is second nature already, and the few times he gets caught picking pockets, all he has to do is kick his target between the legs, bite the hand of anyone who tries to grab him, and run like hell.

Once, he gets in a real fight. He can’t help himself from circling back to his old block, and a couple of older boys smoking on the corner seem to find this suspicious, or maybe they just don’t like the look of him. They crowd him into an alley, and Mello decides it’s better not to run this time. There are four of them, and he takes a beating, but after a few minutes it becomes clear that they’re not actually willing to use the dull knives they wave around to scare him, and Mello absolutely is. He cuts two of them on their arms and one on his jaw, and walks away with bruises and a black eye and an air of unmistakable triumph.

“Gotta be careful with that, boy,” one of his informants says when Mello comes out of the alley, wiping his switchblade against his thigh. He needs to get new clothes soon—these are filthy. “Those are illegal, you know. They catch you with one, you could get three years maybe.”

“Who’s going to tell, you?” Mello says. He points the knife at the old man’s face with a wolflike grin, and the old man laughs.

“Nah, I’m not that stupid. Hey, I got something for you. Got something for me?”

“Give me a minute.”

He goes back to the liquor store, walks around twice, and asks the cashier, “Got any Guigal Côte-Rôties?”

Mello doesn’t actually know much about wine, but he knows that every year, on his birthday, Roger locks himself in his office and drinks a whole bottle of Guigal Côte-Rôtie La Mouline while listening to bad opera music at a high volume. Two years ago, Mello and Matt stole a bottle and drank half of it. It was disgusting. Roger found them and yelled at them for thirty-four minutes, with many references to the expense.

The cashier looks at Mello like he just asked if the Fountain of Eternal Youth could be found in the back.

“What the hell is that?”

“Ugh, never mind,” Mello says haughtily. He sticks his nose in the air and walks out with eight miniatures in his pockets. He trades one to learn that three of Rod Ross’s lieutenants have been spotted in the same neighborhood, and a big meeting is probably in the works. He trades two more to learn the names of the lieutenants and the neighborhood.

And so it goes.

It’s not as comfortable as it was at Wammy’s House, that’s for sure, but Mello is actually enjoying himself. He’s _good_ at this. He was good at schoolwork, too, but it came hard—survival comes easy.

The big meeting is scheduled for December 13—thirty-eight days after L’s death, eight days after Mello leaves Wammy’s House, and the day of his sixteenth birthday. It’s as good a time as any to make his move.

What he would really like, Mello thinks, is a grenade. A grenade would get him into the base with a lot less uncertainty—but somehow, not a single person he pickpockets has one on hand, and it’s much harder to find people willing to sell you one in a back alley, compared to switchblades. One more reason why getting in with weapons smugglers is a good idea. Instead, he makes do with what he has.

One of Rod Ross’s lieutenants, known as Harry Lowell, has a new girlfriend that he likes very much. He visits her at least twice a day, leaving two bodyguards outside to hassle a pretty girl who owns a falafel cart parked a few houses down. That afternoon, Mello trails them to the apartment building. He watches Harry Lowell go inside, and the two guards saunter over to the falafel cart and lean over the counter. A bus is pulling up to a stop a block away, and he runs for it, shouting “Wait! Wait!” and then “Sorry, sorry, ’scuse me” as he bumps into the two guards and lifts their guns from their pockets, quick as lightning.

(The advantage of loose clothing is that it’s easier to disguise the drag of a concealed firearm; the disadvantage is that it’s harder to notice when that weight is gone. This knowledge is going to come in handy more than once in the course of his career.)

There is a fire escape in back of Harry Lowell’s girlfriend’s building. The bottom ladder is raised, but Extreme Hide-and-Seek is one of the favored games at Wammy’s, and Mello is a good climber. He scrambles up to the fourth floor, breaks the lock on the window, and climbs in to find Harry Lowell and his girlfriend naked on the couch.

“What the fuck!” the mafioso yells. He bears a pretty good resemblance to Al Capone, fittingly enough, but he has a more prominent bald spot and not as much poise. As he scrambles to get up, he rolls off the couch and groans as he hits his head on the coffee table. His girlfriend sits up, holds two pillows against her body, and shrieks curses at Mello.

“Get up, Harry, we’re late for a meeting,” Mello says. He confiscates two more guns, and that’s how he gets into Rod Ross’s executive meeting.

The gangsters kick up a fuss, of course. The bodyguards shout a bit about how they’re going to beat Mello to a pulp and that he can’t take all three of them at once, and when he points out that he is holding a gun, one of them says “So what? You won’t shoot, you puny little son of a bitch,” and Mello shoots both of them in the foot. Easier that way. He and Harry walk three blocks and enter an abandoned club with boarded-up windows to find Rod Ross holding court.

There’s a lot of shouting. A lot of guns pointed at Mello—or doing their best, because Harry Lowell is a big man and Mello isn’t, and most of the gangsters can’t get a good line of sight. Rod Ross is sitting on a couch dragged out to the middle of what used to be the dance floor. He has a heavy forehead and small, shrewd eyes, and he doesn’t look happy to see Mello at all.

“Shut up,” he barks at the other gangsters. “If this is threat, it’s not a very good one, kid,” he says in a low, rumbling voice. “I don’t like Harry all that much.”

“Not a threat,” Mello says blithely. He’s pleased to hear that his voice isn’t shaking. His hands are perfectly still, too—it’s his heart that’s fluttering at an unnatural speed. This is going to work, he tells himself, because it _has_ to work. “I didn’t get an invitation myself, so I decided to come as Harry’s plus-one. If your goons promise to be polite, I will too.”

Ross eyes him for a moment, and lifts his hand. He’s wearing a black chalk stripe suit, and Mello spots two creases that indicate handguns. Slowly, the gangsters in the room lower their weapons, and Mello does the same. He makes sure to click the safety on before slipping the gun into his pocket; there’s already one in there, and his message would be ruined if he shot himself in the leg accidentally. Harry Lowell sprints to the far side of the club and blends into the crowd.

“Talk,” Ross orders.

“I want to work with you.”

Instantly, everyone seems to forget that they two seconds ago Mello was crazy dangerous; now he’s just crazy. The room erupts in laughter. Rod Ross doesn’t laugh, but he grins broadly and leans forward with his elbows on his knees.

“People work _for_ me, kid.” He tilts his head and gives Mello an appraising look. “Who you working for now?”

Mello folds his arms.

“Myself.”

The other gangsters laugh again. There’s one man in particular, standing a foot behind and to the left of Ross, who has a laugh like a congested donkey, and the sound is starting to grate on his nerves. Ross sits back against the couch.

“I don’t hire amateurs,” he dismisses.

“You’ll want to hire me,” Mello continues to press. “Because I’m going to kill Kira, and if you help me, I’ll give you his weapon or his power or whatever he uses to kill. And if that one—” He raises his voice over the reaction this evokes, draws his switchblade from his pocket, and points it at the face of the donkey man. “—laughs at me one more time, I swear to God I’m going to cut out his eyes and feed them to him.”

Most of the room finds this hilarious, which Mello doesn’t mind. He can see the humor in a teenager walking off the street and threatening one of your coworkers, especially if your work happens to be theft, smuggling, and murder. But the man he’s pointing at doesn’t laugh, and neither does Ross, and that’s what counts. They’ve seen the look in his eyes.

“Leave the kid alone, Jack,” Ross admonishes. “He’s here on business. We ought to respect that, even we’re not interested in his deal. We’ve got no beef with Kira,” he says to Mello.

“You’ve slowed down since he showed up. Everyone has. The murder rate in this city is down 50%, and your profits are down by—what, 30? 35?” He can tell by the way the mobster’s weight shifts that he’s not far off the mark. “You won’t have to worry about Kira if I take him down.”

“You gonna take him down, huh?” one of the other men flanking Ross chuckles. “Skinny little thirteen-year-old with a switchblade?”

“I’m sixteen. Today’s my birthday,” Mello says, grinning and tilting his head in the way that always makes people uncomfortable. “And what I want more than anything else is Kira’s heart on a pike.”

There is a long pause after this. No one can meet his gaze.

“To the victor belong the spoils,” Mello continues. “Security, the power to kill, profits—none of that matters to me as much as winning, but it’ll go to _someone_.”

The mob boss looks at him again, and there is a greedy gleam in his eyes, but his expression is still wary. He clears his throat.

“Like I said, Kira isn’t our biggest problem right now.”

“What is?” Mello asks bluntly. The words were framed as a dismissal, but he heard the underlying message. This is a negotiation.

“These cold Chicago winters,” Ross says. His craggy face shifts, distorted by a sly grin. “Tell you the truth, I’m getting a bit tired of them. Looking to expand our operation to somewhere with a more favorable climate. I’m making pretty good progress in Las Vegas, but in Los Angeles we’re running into problems with this motherfucker called Juan Baptista. Nasty fellow. Anyone who annoys him gets their throat cut—anyone who causes a _real_ problem gets their head cut clean off. Now, the thing is, he was paranoid _before_ Kira showed up, but since then he’s gone bonkers. He doesn’t go out in public at all anymore, and only a handful of people are let in. No one knows what he looks like, where he’s from. Hell, no one’s even sure if that’s his real name.”

“It’s not,” Mello says immediately. “His name is _Juan Baptista_ and he goes around cutting people’s heads off?” He glances around the room, but it seems like people aren’t getting it. “Haven’t any of you ever read the Bible? Juan Baptista. John the Baptist. Salome asks for his head on a plate.”

It’s cheesy, obvious, and stupid—Baptista’s got the whole story backwards. Mello has never killed anyone before, but he doesn’t think it would be very hard. Not someone who is practically begging for it.

“Ha!” Ross says. He grins wider and leans back with his arms stretched over the sofa. “I never even thought of that. That’s perfect. Okay, that’s your job, little man—bring me the head of Juan Baptista, and you can join me.”

—

The next afternoon, Mello goes to the cemetery. He doesn’t want to, but he has to. This morning, he went shopping. He bought jeans, a clean t-shirt, and a pair of combat boots so he doesn’t look like a kid anymore, and then he found a Christian gift store and bought a new rosary. Good luck for a new endeavor. The problem is that all of the Catholic merchandise was gathered in one section, so while he browsed, the Virgin Mary stared at him from every angle. He tried to ignore her, but he knew he had to pay a visit before he leaves Chicago.

It’s been eight years. There are more gravestones than there were before, and he doesn’t remember exactly where his mother is buried. Mello proceeds slowly down each row, clutching a bouquet of half a dozen red roses in one hand. His mother liked roses. She bought one every few weeks and kept it in an empty glass bottle on their kitchen table, and when it began to wilt she strung it upside down next to the fridge to dry. Red ones, pink ones, white ones, and peach ones. He doesn’t know what she did with them once they were fully dry. Sometimes, when he was mad at her, he would pluck the petals off prematurely and tear them into tiny pieces, but she never seemed to mind.

The creak of the snow beneath his boots is loud, and with each step his heart beats a little faster. He doesn’t know why—he’s not superstitious. There is no one else here. It’s quiet and peaceful. Maybe the quiet itself is bothering him. He has gotten used to the noise of the city, and this cemetery is tucked away in a suburb just distant enough for silence. He shifts the roses to the crook of his elbow and takes a chocolate bar from his jacket pocket. He managed to find Cadbury’s, finally, and the familiar taste is reassuring.

His eyes trace so many headstones that they start to glaze over, and he almost walks past it. Then he stops and stares. It’s a small, modest headstone, no fancy designs, just a few words.

SOFIA JURIC  
June 28 1969 - September 22 1996  
I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night

Mello doesn’t recognize the quotation, but it was clearly chosen by someone who knew her. He wonders if it came from L, or one of his mother’s friends. If she had any. His grandmother died when he was five, and he doesn’t think she had any other family.

But the quote isn’t what shocks him. What shocks him is that there are already flowers lying before the grave. Six white roses, bound with black ribbon.

Mello stares down at them, and then he looks up and scans the cemetery. He doesn’t know exactly what he is looking for—a tail, hidden cameras, a neighbor with binoculars—but there is nothing. It is a cold, windy day, and no one is outside except for him. He looks down at the roses again. He doesn’t think Near left them himself. If Near wanted to be in Chicago, he would have asked Mello to book him a ticket here. No, these were left by a helpful florist, commissioned from halfway across the country.

That doesn’t mean that Near isn’t watching him, though, or tracking his movements. The flowers could be a taunt, or a straightforward reminder: _I know where you are_. Or perhaps Near is simply a more devoted son than Mello, and didn’t need to be guilted by a saint to remember their dead mother.

Mello kneels and places the red roses in front of the headstone. The white are wilted and turning yellow and brown at the edges; they’ve been here for a few days already. There is a card tucked in the ribbon, a plain piece of white cardstock with _— N_ written in black ink. After a moment of hesitation, Mello picks it up and takes a pen out of his backpack. When he sets the card down again, it reads _M + N._ He stands.

There is a plane ticket in his pocket, along with his new rosary and half a dozen stolen credit cards. He has a flight to catch.

“Nate, I’m serious,” he says out loud. “You can’t come with me. You can’t follow me, just—” The wind buffets him, and he shivers. “Leave me alone,” he finishes in a faltering voice.

He looks down at the headstone again. It would upset his mother, to know they have come to this. She was pleased that they got along. _You’re such a good brother, Mihael_ , she used to coo at him, when he convinced Near to finish his dinner or taught him the alphabet or tied his shoelaces for him. Sometimes he thinks she said that because his attentiveness made up for her own inadequacies as a parent. But maybe that is ungenerous.

The only sound as Mello walks away is the crunch of frozen snow under his feet.


	2. Chapter 2

“M-I-H-A-E-L K-E-E-H-L. Your real name is Mihael Keehl.”

He’s not sure what shocks him more—the realization that Soichiro Yagami is the owner of a Death Note and the shinigami eyes, or the sound of his own name. Mello hasn’t heard it spoke out loud in over thirteen years. Honestly, he’d almost forgotten it. He’s been Mello in his own head since the first week at Wammy’s, when he locked himself in the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror and repeated _Mello_ over and over and over again, twisting the rosary bracelet on his wrist.

It had been a gift from L. The rosary. The opportunity to leave behind that weak, frightened child and become something else. Mihael Keehl. God, he hardly remembers Mihael Keehl.

“It’s over, Mello—it’s time to turn yourself in. If you surrender, I give you my word that I won’t kill you.” He takes out a pen and opens the notebook, the very same one Mello previously stole from him. “You know how this works,” he says grimly. “If I write your name down, you will die. Put the switch down and put your hands in the air.”

Mello stares at him in silence. He feels weirdly calm; the pace of his heart is slow and steady. Yagami looks haggard. He already had more gray in his hair than in the police record Mello has on file, but now he’s also lost weight and his skin has an ashen cast. He looks like the ultimate policeman, still. Solid and reliable. But despite his best attempts, he doesn’t look frightening. He doesn’t look like he _hates_ Mello, and he should. Mello kidnapped his daughter, for God’s sake, and the man is trying to take him alive instead of eagerly seizing the opportunity to kill him. Too righteous by half.

“Yagami… you’ve never killed anyone before, have you?” Mello reaches for the drawer. He already knows the answer.

“Don’t move!” Yagami shouts. “I’ve written your first name. It will only take me a second to write your surname!”

In the past four years, Mello has killed thirty-one people with his own hand. Juan Baptista was the twenty-third, and the messiest. Mello shot him in the center of the chest, but it was hard to make a clean kill while avoiding the head and the neck, and it took a few more shots to bring him down. Then he had to hack off the head, which was more difficult than he expected;he accidentally cut his own hand and left a small, jagged scar. He  had to drive from Los Angeles to Chicago with the head in the trunk. It was summer, and it became disgusting quickly.

He had walked into Rod’s base with the head clutched in his hand, his finger twisted in Juan Baptisa’s greasy curls. A couple of people vomited at the stench; Mello managed to hold it together until he was alone, and then he washed his hands six times with steaming water, and even then the smell didn’t seem to go away. He started wearing leather gloves.

Killing became so easy. So, so easy...

“I’m truly sorry,” he says. “For what it’s worth, I never meant to kill you. You should have just written my name down, with no hesitation… but now that I’ve noticed it, you won’t get the chance.”

He’s about to lunge for the handgun in the drawer when he realizes that José is alive. José rolls over and snatches a gun off the ground, unloading it into Yagami’s back. The police officer is in full body armor, but the force of the impact is too much, and he collapses.

“José, the notebook!” Mello shouts as he races to pick up the gask mask fallen from Yagami’s hand. The men outside were close enough to hear his name—protecting his face is his top priority now, not the notebook.

The task force storms the room and shoots José, and then they all point their guns at Mello. And still they don’t pull the trigger. The fact that these people are still in the game is incredible. Mello doesn’t make that mistake. He presses the button.

—

He doesn’t remember what happened next. He must have dropped to the ground from a hole in the wall, because the task force was blocking the exit, and his legs are covered in bruises and his ankle is sprained. He must have been on fire, because his hair is singed and his face, arm, and torso are covered in burned skin, but he must have smothered the flame because he is not bald or dead.

He is conscious, and he needs to move. This is what he knows.

Mello lifts a hand. It shakes, and he notices that the leather of his glove is singed and shrunken. He grabs at a chunk of concrete and uses it to push himself into a standing position. The movement causes the muscles beneath the burn to stretch and pull, and it tears a scream from his throat. He bites his lip to cut it off, and stands still for a moment, panting. Luckily adrenaline is coursing through his body—he is shaking and dizzy, but it’s enough to get him moving. He wobbles on his injured ankle and walks away from the burning building.

It is slow going, painfully slow, terrifyingly slow. The task force is dealing with Yagami, he tells himself, at the very least. If any were still in the hallway, they have been injured in the blast, too. They’ll be going to the hospital first thing. They can’t come after him yet. He reaches up and confirms that the gas mask is still in place and in one piece. They hadn’t seen his face

He’s alive. God, he’s _alive_.

“Glory be,” he mumbles through cracked, bleeding lips. He can barely hear his own voice. “Glory be to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”

The air is full of smoke. His throat is full of smoke—the filter of the mask is cracked from when he hit the ground. He coughs, and has to stop moving, and for half a moment he thinks he is going to suffocate and die right there. But the moment passes, and he keeps walking.

There is a pay phone a few hundred yards from the mafia’s base, near a side road. They use it often, and it has been modified so that it doesn’t require a fee. Mello reaches it, minutes or hours after he regains consciousness, and leans against the base while he catches his breath. He doesn’t know what to do now that he’s here. His vision is going black, and for a moment his heart is seized with terror. He can’t breathe.

He tears off the gas mask and lets it drop to the ground. He presses his forehead against the cool metal of the payphone box and forces air to enter his lungs. In. Out. Unthinkingly, his hand touches his left wrist. The rosary is still there. One decade—ten small silver beads representing ten Hail Marys, three larger ones representing the Apostles’ Creed, the Glory Be, and the Our Father. Most mornings, he prayers on one of his full rosaries, but when he reaches for comfort, it’s the bracelet he turns to.

“Saint Michael the Archangel,” he whispers, “Defend us in our hour of conflict. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.”

Michael has always been _his_ angel, since he was a child. Mello has never forgotten that, even when he forgot his own name.

He remains still, eyes closed, for another minute, and then he picks up the phone and presses the button that will activate a free call. Rod’s gang has members in Chicago and Las Vegas as well as L.A., but he has no idea which ones are still alive, and he can’t rely on them. When Mello killed the members of the SPK, he left two alive on purpose, and Kira might have done the same. They might be under control of the notebook.

There are only two people in the world he can rely on right now, and only one he can bear to call. He’s known the number for a long time, but this is the first time he’s dialed it. The phone only rings once.

“Yeah?”

“Matt,” Mello croaks. His voice is hoarse, and he coughs again. “I need you in L.A.”

There is a pause like Matt is considering and dismissing every other person he knows before he says “Mello?”

“Yeah.”

“ _Fuck no_. I’m done with all that secret detective bullshit. Whatever the hell this is, I’m not part of it. Also, I haven’t heard from you in four years, you absolute _fucking_ tosser, so fuck you too!”

He hangs up the phone. Mello swears a blue streak and smashes the receiver against the base. He jabs at the button again and hits redial. If Matt doesn’t pick up, he’s in trouble—but Matt does.

“I said _fuck you_.”

“Matt,” he says through gritted teeth. “If you don’t come, I have to call Near.”

There is another long pause.

“Are you dying?”

He wants to say no, but a wave of pain hits him and he sways forward and loses his balance. He catches himself at the last moment and a whimper escapes his lips.

“Fuck,” Matt sighs. “Okay. You’re goddamn lucky I’m in San Francisco right now, you know that, yeah? If I was still in Winchester, you’d be fucked. What do you need?”

“Painkillers,” Mello says immediately as black spots flicker in his vision. “Gauze and bandages. A shit ton of gauze and bandages.”

He coughs again and thinks back to Wammy’s. They took First Aid courses, all of them, and some more advanced medical courses were also on offer. One year, Mello complained that he was scheduled for more than other students, and L had said ‘yes, that was at my request’ in a pointed voice. _Thanks, Dad_ , he thinks wryly.

“Iodine... mafenide.”

“Mafenide?”

“You’d know if you ever studied,” he taunts, so that something will feel normal. “It’s an antibiotic.”

“So I’ve got to rob a pharmacy first? Fantastic. Where are you exactly?”

There is a church nearby, an old abandoned mission, and Mello gives him the latitude and longitude. The ringing in his ears is getting louder and he’s sure he must be shouting into the phone—it would explain why his throat feels like he’s swallowing gravel and glass.

“Okay. Okay, I’ll find you. Hey, Mello?”

“Yeah?”

“You know it sounds like you just finished sucking the world’s biggest cock, right?”

He can’t laugh. But he appreciates Matt trying to lighten the mood, and one corner of his mouth lifts.

“Hurry up.”

He hangs up the phone, and then his whole body shudders. He leans against the payphone and closes his eyes. Breathe, he tells himself. In. Out. Ignore it. Ignore it. You’re not going to lose to—

He blacks out. When he comes to again, he’s only standing because he’s hugging the payphone, and his injured arm is shrieking. He stumbles to his feet again and starts to walk down the street with a slow, lurching gait.

It takes him just over half an hour to reach the church. He enters, lays his body down on the back pew, and passes out again. Or maybe he dies.

—

He wakes to the sound of Matt swearing under his breath, an incessant stream of curses. He flinches and looks up at him; he can’t open his left eye, and his right side is pressed against the pew, so it’s hard to see, but he recognizes Matt. He looks just the same—hair a bit longer, some of the baby fat gone from his face, but other than that, no different. His face is twisted in grim lines.

“Don’t say it,” Mello says groggily.

“Say what? Hospital? Because I’m going to fucking say it. I’ve got to take you to hospital.”

“No.” He struggles into a sitting position. The pain isn’t as sharp as it was before, but more intense—a throbbing ache that consumes his whole body, like loud music reverberating through him. “Did you get everything?”

“Yeah. Cmon, it’s too cramped here.”

Matt helps Mello lean on his shoulder and walk up to the altar.

“Is this symbolic enough for you?” he asks.

“Practically blasphemous,” Mello says, though his voice is weak. “Perfect.”

Matt helps Mello lie down again, and the first thing he does is cut away his hair in the places where it’s closest to the burn. Mello won’t let him cut it all off, and the result is a jagged mess, but it will do. Matt starts peel off his clothes next, and that’s when his cheerful attitude slips again, into worried silence. The skin of Mello’s left side is a mess of color—red, black, and blistered where it was exposed to the fire, bruised and purple where he hit the ground from the second story. Luckily the heat resistance of the leather means that the burn is mostly confined to his upper body.

“It’s not as bad as it could have been.”

“Mells, you look like a bomb went off on you.”

“It did. But I was in a safe room when I set it off,” Mello says defensively.

“Doesn’t look that safe.”

“The door was open.”

“Wait, did you just say _you_ set it off?”

“Long story.” He grunts as Matt tries to get his pants off. His legs may not be burned, but the cuts and bruises are a sharp counterpoint to the waves of pain. “That fucking hurts.”

“Oh damn, I almost forgot. Look what I brought you,” Matt says, triumphantly waving a small glass bottle in front of Mello’s face. He squints at the label.

“Shit, is that morphine?”

“Pharmaceutical grade, babes. None of that back alley crap.”

“Oh, God.”

“I’m sorry, you asked for painkillers. Did you want Tylenol?”

“No,” Mello sighs. “No, it’s fine.”

Matt is chatty as he delivers the injection, and Mello lets the words wash over him without paying much attention. It’s a combination of complaints and mockery, mostly—Mello only interrupts when the morphine kicks in and the thought of someone touching his arm doesn’t make him scream. Even so, the first brush of iodine-soaked cotton against his raw nerves feels like sandpaper, and he can’t keep entirely quiet.

“Sorry, sorry,” Matt mumbles. Mello pretends not to hear him.

After Mello cleans the burns, he applies a thick layer of the topical antibiotic and wraps Mello in gauze and bandages. It’s a reversal of Halloween the year they were eleven, Matt points out, when Mello helped him dress up as a mummy. He also splints Mello’s ankle and cleans some of the gashes from the rubble, although Mello insists there isn’t time.

“So let me get this straight,” Matt says. With one hand he leans hard against Mello’s knee, pinning him down so he can treat a wound on his thigh with the other. “You _don’t_ want to die from infected burns, but you _do_ want to die from infected cuts?”

“I want to get out of here before they come back,” Mello says through gritted teeth as he forces himself into a sitting position.

“Who?”

“The Japanese police officers in charge of the Kira investigation. It’s been at least four hours since they—”

“It’s only been two hours since you called me,” Matt interrupts.

“You robbed a pharmacy and booked a flight to LA in half an hour?”

“I didn’t book a flight. I flew my plane.”

“You have a plane?”

“Yeah.”

Mello squints at him.

“You’re a professional video gamer, whatever the fuck that means.”

“And I do some hacker-for-hire business. Tech companies pay a lot to test out their security flaws and shit.”

Mello ponders this for a moment, and narrows his eyes further.

“Did you rob my trust fund?”

Matt grins, unrepentant.

“You didn’t even delete your browser history before you left, mate. It was practically a gift. Don’t worry, there’s still a couple million dollars left.”

“Good,” Mello says grimly. “We’re going to need it. I just blew up all my cash.”

He holds out his hand expectantly, and Matt frowns but helps him stand and put his clothes back on. Mello pants as he limps towards the exit.

“Kira kills people with a magic notebook that belongs to a god of death.” If he were sober he would probably have worded it better, but the morphine is making everything fuzzy.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I was expecting,” Matt says with a nod. Mello peers at him—he can’t tell if Matt believes him or not, but he assumes that he does and presses on.

“There are at least three notebooks. One was in the possession of the Japanese task force, but I took it from them, and they just took it back. One belongs to Kira. And one—Kira must have given it to the task force, because one of its members was able to make a deal with the shinigami that let him find out my real name. The notebook needs a name and a face to kill.”

“Okay,” Matt says. “So we’re on the run from the Japanese police.”

“And the American police.”

“Got it.”

“But especially the Japanese, because that one guy said my name out loud, so if any of them come back and see my face I’m fucked. And I need to get to New York City.”

“Why?”

They’ve made it out of the church. Son of a bitch, Matt really does have a plane. Which is good, because flying commercial isn’t really an option right now. It’s small, with room for four people and not much else, and painted a garish turquoise and yellow, like something out of a video game. Mello walks toward it in a wobbly line, leaning on Matt’s arm to stay on track. The combination of the morphine, the residual pain, and his leg injuries is a bit much to deal with all at once.

“Because,” he manages. His lips feel weirdly thick. “That’s where Near is. Near has a photo of me. And if anyone sees that photo—”

“You’re fucked.”

“I’m fucked. And...” There are spots in front of his eyes again. Bluish-white ones now. Mello blinks hard to make them go away.

“And?” Matt prompts.

“What?”

“You have to go to New York to get the photo, _and…_?”

“Halle Lidner,” Mello says after a pause.

“Who’s Halle Lidner?”

“She’s on Near’s team, and I think I can convince her to tell me what’s going on. I don’t want to contact the task force and the fake L without a crew or a base, but Near will be talking to him a lot, and I need to know everything he learns.”

“The task force has been pretty useless so far, though,” Matt comments.

They’ve reached the passenger side of the plane. The door is a good foot above the ground, and for a moment Mello thinks this is going to be his downfall. Matt squats down to give him a boost, and Mello bites his lip so hard it bleeds—what’s one more injury?—at the pressure on his injured leg, but he manages to scramble into the plane.

“You really think it’s that important to know what the Japanese police think?” Matt continues, once he’s entered from the other side.

“Kira helped them infiltrate my base,” Mello says acidly. Out of everything that’s happened in the last few years, he thinks this is the most despicable. “Either he’s a member of the task force, or he’s comfortable using them as his pawns—either way, yeah, I need to know what they’re doing.”

Matt nods and starts flicking switches on the plane’s dashboard.

“How long will it take to get there?” Mello asks, buckling his seatbelt.

There is a pause as Matt calculates it in his head.

“Three days.”

“Come on, Matt. You got here in an hour and a half.”

“Yeah, and I damn near approached the never-exceed speed because I thought you were _dying_. That’s the speed at which the plane either rattles itself to pieces or I lose control and we crash and die and neither of us _ever_ gets to New York. At the max cruising speed, it’s a straight eighteen-hour flight, plus we need to stop and refuel probably three times, plus I need to sleep, because I’m not taking chances on sleep deprivation when we’re a couple thousand meters in the air. Also, I paid enough attention in class to know we’re going to have to change your bandages a couple of times and that a lack of oxygen can slow the healing—which, again, is a problem when we’re six thousand meters up, so we’re not taking shortcuts about your health.”

“Fine,” Mello sighs. “Fine. Can one of our stops be in Chicago? I have a safe house there.”

It’s a studio apartment, and he hasn’t spent more than two months there in total; the mafia has been operating out of L.A. and Vegas more, these last two years. But he has clothes there, and guns, and a couch Matt can sleep on for a few hours, and that’s enough. Matt agrees that Chicago will be fine, and the plane starts to move. The takeoff, in Mello’s condition, is absolutely bizarre—his limbs feel so slow and clumsy, and his head so fuzzy, that for a moment he is convinced he’s going to roll right off the plane.

Once it steadies, he glances into the row of seats behind him and realizes it’s not empty, as he expected. On the contrary, he sees two small duffle bags, at least five laptop cases, and a large, boxy equipment bag, the kind audiovisual specialists carry around. This is not the kind of equipment someone brings on an emergency call because they think an old school friend is dying. Matt may claim he’s out of the game, but his equipment says otherwise.

Mello turns around and stares out at the sky before them. The waning moon looks like a stage prop hanging in the sky, and the stars are almost all hidden by smudges of dark cloud. He closes his eyes.

“Thank you.”

If Matt has a response, he doesn’t hear it.

—

In the end, it takes only two days and change to reach New York, but they arrive in the middle of the day, when Lidner is still at the SPK headquarters. They stash the plane at a small airport and go up to Manhattan. Mello’s burn has healed enough that he decides he doesn’t need to walk around with gauze on his face, but it itches like crazy, and people stare as they walk down the street. Matt suggests they go to a hotel, but Mello refuses.

“Too many security cameras,” he says.

“I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

“No Star Wars references.” He has a killer headache, maybe from being at a high altitude for so long, maybe just to add insult to injury.

“If you recognize a reference, you can’t tell me not to make it. That’s just against the rules. And if you think I can’t hack a few measly hotel cameras—”

“No hotels. We’ll go to Lidner’s apartment and wait for her there.”

“No, _we_ won’t,” Matt says as he hefts one of his equipment bags higher onto his shoulder. He’s burdened pretty heavily, but he refused to let Mello take anything in case his leg gave out and dropped one of the precious computers on the ground. “You can head straight to Lidner’s if you want, but I’m not going with you.”

“Why not?” Mello asks. He sounds impatient, but there’s an undercurrent of alarm he can’t quite stamp out. He wasn’t unconscious for the _entire_ plane ride, and he spent much of that time getting Matt up to speed on the Kira case, while skirting around some of his more unsavory deeds in the mafia. Neither of them had said outright that Matt was going to help, but he had assumed….

“Because if I do, eventually Lidner and Near are both going to know I’m in this. What they don’t know, they can’t tell the Japanese task force, and _they_ can’t tell Kira.” Matt’s gaze is inscrutable as always, behind the goggles, but he’s frowning. “Face it, mate: if you weren’t conspicuous before, you sure as hell are now. Nobody has access to your photo or your face, but they’re all trying for it. You found Lidner and Gevanni, and they go in and out of the SPK headquarters at will, so they can be found, too. Of all the people hunting Kira right now, the only ones whose identities are unknown to the task force are me, Near, and this Rester guy, and even they’re _known_ unknowns. I’m the only person Kira isn’t looking for—and I’m more useful to you if it stays that way.”

His voice is uncharacteristically serious, and Mello considers him for a moment as they push through the crowd.

“Careful, Matt,” he says. “That almost sounded smart.”

“Who, me? Never.”

His ankle is starting to throb a little, and his burn is hot and itchy. They’re a block away from Lidner’s building, and as soon as he spots a bench he sits down and stretches out his legs.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m going to Lidner’s apartment. Assuming she agrees to help, I’ll stay there for a few more days. Near is going to have a lot of questions for the Japanese police, and I want to hear their answers.” Neither he nor Matt points out that he also needs time to heal, that the burns on his face are still painful and that he has refused additional doses of morphine. “The new president might make changes to the SPK, too. I’ll give it a week, and if nothing significant has happened I’ll convince Lidner to take me to the headquarters.”

“Okay.” Matt is already pulling out a laptop. “There’s a hotel a block away from Lidner’s place. I’m going to wait in the lobby and start looking for the headquarters. It’s going to have incredible security, of course, but I’m not trying to break in yet, just _find_ it, so that actually works in our favor. If I can, or if Lidner is willing to tell you where it is, I’ll find an empty place nearby so we can get eyes on it before you go in. Here.” He starts pulling more electronics out of his bag, including a cell phone, a tiny earpiece, and a thin plastic disc. “Speed dial one. Turn _this_ on or off as you like and I’ll be able to talk to you and hear what’s happening—do me a favor and turn it on if she shoots you, yeah? Just so I know. And put _this_ in your shoe.”

“In my shoe?” Mello parrots, accepting the plastic disc with a frown.

“It’s a tracker. If someone suspects you’re bugged, they’ll probably make you leave behind cell phones and personal possessions and _maybe_ clothes, but they usually don’t think of shoes.”

“Usually? How many people have _you_ kidnapped?”

“Not as many as you. How many times did you make them take off their shoes?”

Mello wordlessly slips the tracker into his boot and stands.

“All right. Let’s get it done.”

He holds out his fist, and Matt grins.

“M-Squared is back in business.”

He holds up his own fist and they tap, top and bottom, even though Mello can’t help but roll his eyes. He turns around and struts down the street, pulling a chocolate bar from his pocket.

—

He’s sitting on Halle Lidner’s couch when she comes home. He’s given in and applied more ointment and a thin sheet of gauze to the more severe burns, including the one on his face, so he’s not as intimidating as he could be, but hopefully the gun gets his point across.

“Welcome home, Hal.”

Her only reaction is a slight widening of her eyes. She steps further into the apartment and hangs her coat on the hook; Mello can tell by the way she moves that there is a gun in a shoulder holster under her blazer, and he wonders if she wants him to see it or not.

“Gevanni owes me fifty dollars,” she says in a cool voice.

“You’re not going to collect that just yet,” Mello says, leaning forward to rest one elbow on his knee. The gun remains steady.

“I’m not?”

“You’re going to tell me everything Near knows, and you’re not going to tell him I’m alive until I say so.”

“Near knows you’re alive,” she retorts, which is the only thing she could have said that surprises Mello.

“How?”

“I’m not sure.” She sits down in a small armchair opposite him and crosses her legs, resting her hands in her lap. In this position, she will be able to draw her gun quicker and with less obvious movements than if she were standing. “We saw satellite footage of the explosion, and he said there was no way it had killed you. When we asked why, all he said was that you had set the bombs, and suicide is a sin in Catholicism. I thought it was a joke.”

Her eyes flicker to the cross on his gun and the crucifix on his chest, and Mello frowns. It is a joke, of sorts, but not a funny one.

“What has the Japanese task force told Near about the raid?”

Lidner raises one eyebrow.

“Ratt’s loyalty may have been for sale, but mine isn’t.”

Mello smirks. Ratt’s price wasn’t even that high.

“I figured as much. And this is just for show, you know,” he said, waving the gun around in flagrant violation of gun safety regulations. Lidner purses her lips in disapproval. “Don’t get me wrong, I _will_ shoot you if I have to, but I don’t expect it to do any good. You were a Secret Service agent for the last president and a CIA agent before that—I wouldn’t expect you to cave to torture.”

“Then why me? Why not Gevanni?”

“Because Gevanni has been asking for more interesting assignments ever since he joined the FBI. He’s on this case because it’s the case of the century, not because it’s Kira. You, on the other hand, are here because for a year while you were in DC, you were roommates with a woman named Aimi Frederick. She was a worldwide expert in certain types of environmental pollutants, and in 2004 she was sent by the WHO to investigate one of Yotsuba’s factories—but she was epileptic, and she had a fatal seizure on the plane ride there. The remaining members of the team were less experienced, and the factory was given the okay. You don’t just want to win, you want to beat Kira because he killed your friend.”

Lidner doesn’t respond right away. She looks at him with narrowed eyes, sizing him up, and her hand inches away from her gun.

“Not bad,” she says.

“Not bad?” he echoes, outraged, and she smirks at him. Apparently Near has told his team about their competition at Wammy’s, which grates on his pride.

“Aimi wasn’t my roommate—she was my girlfriend. We broke up a few weeks before she went to Japan, but we were still quite close.”

“Well, next time, put that on your lease agreement,” Mello scowls. “I can’t be expected to know that. Are you going to help me or not?”

“Get that thing out of my face.” Mello lowers the gun so the barrel is resting on his thigh, but he doesn’t let go of it. Lidner pushes a lock of hair behind her ear and says “You’re younger than you look.”

“What?”

“You’re younger than you look, aren’t you?” she repeats quietly. “It’s funny. Near looks about ten years old until you hear him speak, and you look… not old, exactly, but…. Really you’re both probably—what, eighteen?”

“Not that it matters, but I’m twenty-one,” Mello says, rounding up without shame. “Near is eighteen.”

“Hm.” Her amber eyes gleam, and Mello wonders what he just gave away, but Lidner changes the subject. “I’ll help you. What do you want to know?

—

Mello spends the next four days there. He checks in with Matt daily, sleeps more than he’s ever slept in his life, watches the news, and stands at the door with his gun out every time Hal comes back home, which she hates. He doesn’t want her to start thinking they’re friends. She doesn’t ask him any more personal questions, and three-quarters of their conversation is about the Kira case, but she does take liberties. She _flirts_ with him, which is something that not even the bevy of prostitutes surrounding Rod’s gang ever worked up the courage to do, and she complains that he is lazing around all day while she works and doesn’t even do her the courtesy of having dinner waiting when she gets home.

There is half a bottle of vodka in the back of her cupboard. He drinks a lot of it.

On the fourth day, Hal enters the apartment and puts her finger to her lips before Mello can say a word. She’s wearing a wire. Part of him is annoyed that Near predicted his actions at all, but the greater part is smug that it took him so long.

When he enters SPK’s headquarters, there is a sense of… anticlimax. Near is sitting on the floor, surrounded by a toy train track, wearing the same damn thing he’s been wearing for years. He doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t even look up as he says “Welcome, Mello,” in a voice just a shade deeper than he remembers but no less bland.

The other two members of the SPK shout at him to put his gun down, but Mello ignores them. He’s not actually going to shoot Hal—he knows that, she knows that, and he’s pretty sure Nar knows that. He’s not convinced they won’t try to shoot _him_. That Commander Rester looks just as righteous as Soichiro Yagami and a hell of a lot more comfortable holding a fatal weapon.

They obey Near when he tells them to lower their guns, though, and Near is surprisingly comfortable giving the order. One of them even calls Near _sir_ , and Mello thinks about laughing.

“It seems like things are going like you planned, Near.”

“Yes. I expect Lidner’s told you all about the second L by now. I’ve pretty much figured out who Kira is, and it’s all thanks to everything you’ve done.”

The thing that Mello hates most about his brother is that when he says things like this, he isn’t even bragging.

Near doesn’t brag. He would have to _care_ in order to brag. Mello can spend every waking moment striving for greatness, obsessing over how to win—he’s spent the last _four years_ bleeding and clawing and killing his way to the top, he’s walked through _fire_ to get here, because this competition is _everything_ to him. To Near it is nothing. He does nothing except sit and think and play with his toys, and he will still win. He doesn’t have to _try_ in order to beat Mello, he doesn’t have to think about him, and he won’t even fucking _look at him_.

“Shut _up_ , Near!” he yells, brandishing the gun again. This time he points it at the back of Near’s head. “I’m not a tool for you to use to solve the puzzle!”

_Look at me!_

“If you want to shoot me, shoot.”

He could do it. He could pull the trigger. He’s killed thirty-one people and it only gets easier with time—this is something he knows, and Kira knows, that L and Near could never understand. He can pull the trigger right now and the game will be over and he will have won. He will have proven his father wrong.

He thinks back to that church. The blue stained glass windows and the baby with tears on his cheeks, hiccuping into silence and staring up at Mello with those big, dark eyes…

 _Just_ _look_ _at me_.

Hal intervenes. She pushes his gun down and makes some argument about retaliation and catching Kira, and he lets them all think that’s why he doesn’t pull the trigger.

“I just came to retrieve the photograph.”

Suddenly he is exhausted.

“Of course.” Near holds it up. It’s smaller than it was before, and he isn’t surprised to see that Near has already cut himself out of it. “There are no copies, and the surveillance cameras here don’t record. I’ve already dealt with everyone we knew at Wammy’s—it’s not a hundred percent, but it’s safe to say you won’t be killed by the notebook.”

He remembers the day this was taken. It was two years after they arrived at Wammy’s, and one sunny fall day, Mello convinced Near to actually come outside. The other kids were playing soccer, and Mello joined them for a little while, but when they started to organize a game of hide and seek, he declined to play. He knelt by Near and watched his brother play with his train and his figurines, thinking of nothing in particular. He remembers tugging at the grass absentmindedly, and his surprise when Roger came over to them, glanced around, and told them he was going to take their picture.

“Why?” Mello asked suspiciously.

“Because L asked me to.”

He had been pleased. Near kept playing with his train, and waved Mello away when he tried to get him to look at the camera and smile. God, he hasn’t thought about that day in a long time. He tries not to think about Wammy’s too often—even lately, when he’s been around Matt, he tries to focus on the present instead of dwelling on old memories. He doesn’t do regrets.

Mello turns the photo over. _Dear Mello_ , it reads, and he frowns. Is this another taunt? He never did decide what to think about those roses.

“Is that the only business you had with me, Mello?” Near asks.

Mello puts the photo in his pocket. It’s only fair, he thinks, to tell Near something about the notebook. He starts with the shinigami and is only mildly surprised that Near believes him straight off. Actually, he isn’t focusing very well right now. It’s Wammy’s, getting in his head. Those damn bells.

They used to study in the chapel, sometimes, when the library got too crowded, back when they still studied together. They were in chapel the day they prepared for the first math test after Near was transferred into Mello’s higher-level class.

“You’re doing really well,” Mello had said. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised—there must be something in that big head of yours.”

He had ruffled Near’s hair and laughed, and Near had ducked and shoved at his chest.

“I’d say I’m doing extremely well,” he replied with a smile that was still too childish to be called smug. “You better watch out, nichan.”

“Oh yeah? Bet you can’t beat my score tomorrow,” Mello taunted, drumming his pencil on their test prep. Near flipped a lock of hair between his fingers.

“You’re on.”

That was how it started. It used to be _fun_.

Mello is already walking away, but he’s thinking of that day and listening to the clamour of the bells, and suddenly he stops.

“Mello—”

“Near—”

He takes a chocolate bar from his pocket and grins to himself. This is fine. This is more than fine. They started out on equal footing, and that’s where they are now. The same information, the same goal. Different resources, but then again, their methods are so dissimilar that that’s probably for the best.

“Which of us is going to reach Kira first, I wonder?” he muses.

“The race is on,” Near says with a low chuckle, and Mello grins.

“Our destination is the same. I’ll be waiting for you there.”

There is a breathless pause, and Near asks his question in a voice barely more than a murmur.

“Do you hear them?”

Mello bows his head.

“Yes.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: non-graphic references to past underage sex, hard drug use, and addiction.

A week later, Mello’s good mood has vanished.

He had listened to Near’s conversation with L when the mob was at the SPK’s door, and heard the smug satisfaction in the fake’s voice, palpable even with the mock concern and the electronic distortion. It decided him. Kira has assumed the mantle of L. After that, it was only a matter of time before he discovered Light Yagami’s name.

This progress should be satisfactory, but each day has brought its own headaches—beginning with the fact that he had stood and watched helplessly while a pro-Kira mob tried to murder his brother. Then he and Matt return to L.A. and spend several days doing absolutely _nothing_. Sitting around and listening and watching. The immobility is going to drive Mello insane, aided and abetted by Matt’s complaining.

When Matt calls him to say that Aizawa and Mogi are talking outside of the task force’s hotel, Mello jumps at the chance to do something useful. He is tailing Misa Amane just a few blocks away. If there is a decent crowd on the street, he may be able to get close enough to hear their conversation….

No such luck. He swears under his breath as he turns the corner just in time to see the two men reenter the building. He should go back to Amane, but he needs a break. The woman talks, a lot—to Mogi, to hotel employees, to fellow performers back in Japan—and Mello has listened to every word. He is positive that, whatever Amane has done in the past, she isn’t involved in the Kira case _now_.

Instead, he crosses the street and goes up to the apartment where Matt is staying. Matt is staring at his handheld when Mello enters the apartment, and he frowns. Is he even paying attention? He slams the door behind him and drops his laptop case on the floor. Matt jumps and looks up.

“Mello!” he says. “What’re you—you decided to leave Amane?”

“Yeah. I thought I’d walk by and see if I could hear what Mogi and Aizawa were talking about, but they went back inside. I always carry the laptop around with me, so we can monitor her from here.” He drops into an armchair and pushes his hair back with one hand. “You saw me, didn’t you? I walked right in front of the cameras.”

“Yeah, of course,” Matt says with a shrug, eyes still on the game. Mello draws his foot back and kicks him, hard, in the shins. “Ow!”

“I didn’t go within twenty feet of a camera. I swear to God, Matt, if you don’t take this seriously—”

“I _am_ taking it seriously,” Matt interrupts, tossing his handheld on the table in front of him. “Okay, _fine_ , I’m not staring directly at every screen every moment of the day because nothing fucking happens, but there’s this little thing called peripheral vision. I’ve made a fucking note of every time someone goes in and out, all right, so give me a break.”

“You’ve been asking for a break since this started,” Mello snaps. “I had mob guys working for me who had two brain cells and a better attention span than you.”

Matt counters that it’s easier to focus your thoughts when you don’t have any, but Mello ignores that. There’s an itch under his skin. This whole thing was more fun when he was with the mafia, spinning circles around Kira and the task force at the same time. He’s been thinking about that time a lot lately—it’s got his blood up.

Abruptly, Mello stands and shoves the coffee table away with his leg to give himself more space. Then, before Matt can ask what he’s doing, he drops to his knees and reaches for the other man’s zipper.

“What the _fuck_ are you _doing_?” Matt yelps, jumping back, but Mello grabs him by the waist band and keeps him close.

“Motivating you the same way I motivated those morons.” He reaches up and takes hold of Matt’s chin with one gloved hand. “Watch the screens, or I bite,” he warns.

Matt clamps his mouth shut and his cheeks turn red. Matt had a thing for him, back then. Mello’s always figured as much, but they’ve never discussed it. Matt doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t protest or push Mello away, just swears under his breath Mello strokes him though his boxers. Mello sucks at the head for a moment, then pulls his cock free and swallows it down to the base.

He used to do stuff like this a lot. It was a good way to psych out gangsters when he was just starting out. They would look at him and he could see them adding and subtracting in their estimation of him. Crazy eyes, _plus_ , skinny, _minus_ , boss’s approval, _plus plus_ , queer, _minus minus_  He got into a lot of bare knuckle fights and shot a lot of people in painful places, and that helped, but there was always a little bit of doubt. No way a guy who looks like _that_ can make it to the top.

Mello knows how power works. He knows that only weak men hide their weaknesses. It wasn’t enough to do what the other guys did—bring someone to the club every once in a while, get a blowjob in front of everyone, and gloat. For him, that would only dancing around the issue. Nobody cared about Mello getting a blowjob. _Giving_ a blowjob, on the other hand… that was what mattered. That was what they didn’t like to think about, and that was what he needed to display. Weak men hide their weaknesses. Strong men flaunt them.

The first time was when he was with Juan Baptista’s gang, a few days after he made his first kill. _That little cocksucker?_ some drunk goon had laughed. _No way. No fuckin’ way he did that_. Mello had sauntered over, batted his eyelashes, and dropped to his knees. And when he was done, he stood up and shot the man in the thigh. He lived, but it had been touch and go for a while, and he was always twitchy around Mello after that.

As he advanced, the threat became less obvious and less necessary. Then he was close enough to Baptista to kill him and present his head to Rod, and once they relocated west, he rose so quickly that the threat wasn’t necessary at all. It was just something fun he did every once in a while. He especially liked the dumb ones—they ones who weren’t gay but got so gosh darn confused when Mello flirted and lounged against them and wore leather outfits they were more used to seeing on prostitutes than other gangsters. Poor little idiots.

Matt isn’t dumb. He pretends to be, though, and that pisses Mello off. It always has.

“Fuck, Mells,” Matt sighs, and when Mello glances up he has closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the couch. Mello pulls off.

“What did I say?” he demands. Matt lifts his head and gives him a dazed look.

“What…? Oh, the monitors.”

“I said watch the goddamn monitors.”

“I’m watching, I’m watching,” he promises, although his eyes glaze over as soon as Mello’s mouth touches his cock again.

Mello actually kind of likes giving head. The whole reason he has to prove a point like this is because he is attracted to men. Sure, performing oral sex isn’t the most gratifying task, but the taste, the smell, the sounds—it all gets associated with sex in general, and on the occasions when he blows men who are _actually_ gay, he is able to play up his enjoyment and  transition from foreplay to sex quite nicely. It’s not just a chore.

It should be different because it’s Matt. It should be… he’s not sure. Either better or worse. Either he should feel more comfortable because he knows Matt so well, or he should feel more awkward. But he doesn’t. Matt has a dick. It’s pretty average in terms of size, and they all taste more or less the same. His hygiene is a little better than average, and the noises he makes are quieter but more frequent, and he is more handsy than usual—or at least, more handsy than the people Mello has blown. Amongst the general population, it may be common to touch the head of the person sucking one’s cock, even to force it down, but no one has ever been that stupid with him.

Matt doesn’t seem aware of the danger. He isn’t forceful about it. He just… sort of runs his hands through Mello’s hair. His touch is warm and solid. He’s wearing gloves, like Mello, but his feel older—the leather is soft. After a moment, his left hand comes to rest at the base of Mello’s skull, his pinky brushing against the nape of Mello’s neck. His right hand brushes a lock of hair out of Mello’s face.

Mello pulls off again, and impatiently knocks his hand away.

“Will you stop molesting my head?” he snaps.

“Christ. I’m not allowed to look at you _and_ I’m not allowed to touch you? Any other rules I need to be aware of?”

“Yeah, you’re not allowed to bitch about it, either.”

The skin around Matt’s eyes tightens. Mello glares at him for a moment, and looks back at his dick—it’s shiny with spit and leaking precome—but before he can do anything about it, Matt grabs a handful of hair and _yanks_.

“You know what? Fuck off, Mello.”

Mello recoils, knocking Matt’s arm away for a second time, and almost falls on his ass. He stumbles, but he manages to catch himself and stands.

“ _What_?”

“I said fuck off. I’ll watch the goddamn monitors.”

He buckles his pants and snatches a laptop, staring at the screen and pointedly ignoring Mello, who stares at him in outrage.

“ _Fine_ ,” he snarls, and without knowing what the hell just happened, he stomps out of the apartment and slams the door behind him.

—

Mello hates L.A. He stalks down its streets and wishes he were anywhere else. It’s December and still over 60 degrees Fahrenheit—ridiculous.

He has been living here on and off for four years now, and he is never going to get used to it. It’s too hot, too shiny, too eager to dull the edges of anything that might make it genuinely interesting. Winchester was like that too, in a way. If L.A. is a magazine, Winchester is a picture postcard. Less glossy but equally unreal.

Ironically, if he had to pick one place to call home, it would be Chicago. He had been so eager to get away, all those years ago, and yet…

He misses the cold, and the wind, and the comforting strength of the steel skyscrapers rather than this endless sprawl. He misses the view from his safe house—Lake Michigan, lined with only a narrow strip of beach, spreading out as far as he could see. Once he had traveled back to the city with Rod to deal with a minor rebellion and ended up having to get his hands dirty for the first time in months. That night he went home to his apartment and collapsed from exhaustion, and woke up to see that the lake was partly frozen. He spent the entire morning staring at it, watching the ice floes crack and crash into each other.

He shoves his hands deeper into his pockets, the way he would if it was _properly_ cold. Besides, in Chicago people were easy to understand. He knew what they wanted, and he gave it to them. He told them what to do, and they obeyed him. Easy.

Mello walks the streets for hours, thinking about how much progress Near is probably making right now (damn him), and how much he hates Kira, and what he would give to ask L for advice. He thinks about random things like his mother’s headstone and the restaurant that used to be where the liquor store is now and the chapel at Wammy’s and the mob in New York and the way the photograph had burned…

And Matt.

Yeah. As much as he tries not to, he thinks about Matt.

—

He goes back later that evening, back to the vacant apartment across the street from the task force headquarters. He has to; he left the laptop there. He doesn’t say anything when he enters. Matt is exactly where he left him, except instead of playing a game he’s just sitting there. Waiting. Glaring at Mello from behind his goggles.

“Mello, we need to talk.”

“We really don’t,” Mello says. He could take the laptop and leave, but that would feel too much like running away. (Only weak men hide their weaknesses.) Instead he crosses the room and pulls his jacket off, flopping into the battered old armchair. Matt remains on the sofa, glaring at him.

“Fine,” he says. “Then I quit.”

“You what?”

“I _fucking_ quit.” Matt stands and starts slamming computers closed. “Because you know what? I don’t fucking work for you, Mells! I’m not here because you’re paying me, or because I’m just that fucking principled. I’m here because I’m your friend, and if I’m not your friend then I’ve got fucking better things to do with my time.”

“Are you kidding me?” Mello snaps. He stands too, blood rushing through his veins. “You’re really throwing a hissy fit because I gave you a fucking blowjob? You can’t just say thanks and get—”

“Thanks? _Thanks_?”

“—get back—yeah, that’s what I said, why the fuck not?”

He’s never seen Matt this angry. Matt stops in the middle of what he’s doing and storms right up to him.

“You’re a piece of fucking work, you _bastard_. If you want to have sex with me you could have fucking asked.”

He pokes Mello in the chest and Mello sees red. The last person to do that lost a finger.

“I didn’t want to have sex with you,” he says in a cold voice.

“Yeah, I noticed, because instead you decided to wind me up, or— or pull some fucking power play like I’m some mafia mug. The fact that I had a crush on you when we were fucking fourteen is _leverage_ now?” He shoves Mello’s shoulder, turns around and stalks across the room. “ _God_ , Mello. Do you even remember what it’s like to have a friend? Or is winning really the only thing that matters and fuck everything and everyone else?”

“It’s always been the only thing that matters,” Mello says furiously. “Jesus Christ, did you even know me at Wammy’s?”

“Here’s a thought—” Matt says, making a sweeping gesture with one arm. “ _You already lost_. You lost, Near won, Near has all the resources, Near is going to be the next L, game fucking over.”

“Nothing is over until Kira is dead!” Mello shouts, so loud he knows the words are reverberating through the thin walls of this shitty apartment. It’s Matt’s words that are ringing in his ears, though, making his heart race and his head spin. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t have all the pieces, he’s wrong he’s wrong he’s _wrong_.

“You lost the notebook, you lost your whole crew, you almost _died_ ,” Matt persists, hammering the words in one by one. “You lost this round, Mello, and Kira beat you. Let Near take the next one. God,” he laughs and turns away from Mello, lacing his hands behind his head. “God, it’s been like this since school. You and Near in a race to the bottom. You know what you’re competing for? To be the best?” he says in a mocking voice. “The prize is getting to lock yourself in a room for the rest of your life and hide behind an alias behind the alias you already have, and fuck friends and fuck family and fuck everything else. You’re competing to be the best, most dysfunctional person in the world.”

His arms drop to his side, and some of the anger leeches out of him. He stares at Mello for a minute and gives a helpless shrug. Mello’s throat is as dry as smoke, and he swallows.

“Someone has to do it,” he snarls. “Someone has to catch Kira, avenge L—”

“It doesn’t have to be you,” Matt interrupts in a voice that sounds almost desperate. He takes a step closer. “Listen, Mells, I know it’s your worst nightmare, or whatever, but you know what I’ve done since I left Wammy’s? Not a damn thing. I’ve been mediocre and it feels great. You know you can do that too? You can—you can fuck people you _want_ to fuck, and sleep in and smoke weed and play video games and eat shitty pizza and get sloppy drunk and go out and make real friends. Do you even know how many options there are out there? I get _paid_ to play _Mario Kart_. You can get a job at McDonald’s if you want, or take art classes at community college and paint fucking fruit bowls or—or even if you’ve got to be the best at something, why is secret fucking detective the only job worth doing? Go to medical school! Go to law school! Whatever, mate, just—just—”

He holds up two cupped hands, like he can take Mello’s skull between his palms and twist it a little bit to the right and make everything fall into place. Like one of Near’s 3D puzzles. Like his mind is made of interlocking pieces of wood, grinding against each other and sitting the wrong way, waiting to be solved.

“Be _normal_. Yeah? You’re this close to killing yourself over this, you know that? But you don’t have to, you don’t have to be the one to win this.”

“Yes,” Mello says. His own voice sounds very distant to him. “Yes, I do.”

“ _Why_?”

There is nothing to say but the truth.

“Because L was my father,” he says. “Mine and Near’s.”

It takes Matt several seconds to process this, and then his jaw drops.

“Wait, _what_? L was—Near— _what_?”

One side of Mello’s lips twist into a bitter smile.

“It’s not like my parents were _married_ ,” he sneers. “L just—I don’t know, had a thing for our mom.”

Matt is staring at him, but Mello looks away. His eyes run over the peeling wallpaper in the room and the scuff marks on the floor, and his smile turns into a scowl. He thought he was going to rule the world, once, and now he’s squatting in a condemned building with one real ally, who is about to walk out the door. How far he’s come.

“So, yeah, it fucking matters what I do,” he says finally. Anger is smoldering in his stomach—not a raging fire, but banked coals, burning low, always ready to reignite. “My father was the _three_ greatest detectives in the world, and he died trying to save the world from the biggest mass murderer in history. My mother, on the other hand, was a junkie who died of a morphine overdose when I was seven and left behind a bunch of shitty paintings and two bastard kids she couldn’t be bothered to _feed_ on a daily basis. One of my parents died a hero and one died a nobody. And my little brother—”

He lets out a short, hysterical laugh.

“My little brother is a goddamn _genius_ who’s going to succeed L and save the fucking world, so of course we know which side he’s going to end up on. And then there’s _me_.”

He lifts both arms in the air and holds them there. Part question, part elaborate joke. _Here I am. A hero or a tragedy? And who can tell the fucking difference anyway?_

Matt swallows.

“So you were fucked from the beginning, huh?” he mumbles.

Mello drops his hands and releases out a shaky sigh.

“Yeah. I… I know I’m not as smart as Near, okay? And I know I’m never going to be better than L, and I know—I know I’m probably going to die young and it’s probably going to be my own damn fault. But I can’t give up. I just _can’t_.”

“Okay.” Matt pauses, mulling it over. “ _L_ was your _dad_. Fucking hell, Mells.”

There’s pity in his voice. Matt has never, ever pitied him before—it’s half the reason they became friends in the first place. Mello drops his gaze to the floor and pats down his pockets, feeling for a chocolate bar. He sits down on the back of the couch and takes a bite, and Matt—bless him—takes the hint. He shoves his goggles up on his forehead, leans against the doorframe, and lights a cigarette.

“Like I said,” Mello says with a shrug. “They weren’t married. He didn’t raise us. He showed up after her funeral and talked with us for a couple hours—mostly me—and sent us to Wammy’s. He sent us letters. Once a year we did a video chat. And when he died we got a shit-ton of money transferred to our accounts. That was it.”

“Huh.” Matt blows out a mouthful of smoke. “Shit—is that why the two of you were always late to the Halloween party?”

“Nothing gets past you, does it?” He nibbles on the edge of his chocolate bar and glances up at Matt from beneath his lashes. “Did you really have a crush on me when we were fourteen?”

Matt flashes a small grin.

“And fifteen. And a little bit at sixteen, too, although by then I was pretty pissed at you. I take it you didn’t reciprocate?”

He hadn’t noticed. Not until the summer before he left Wammy’s, and by that point, the Kira investigation was in full swing and he had more important things to think about then boys. That was how he put it to himself: _boys._ He hadn’t thought about Matt, specifically. Everything about Matt, about other boys at school or actors or the attractive postman, about the weird feelings in his stomach sometimes, about all those godforsaken wet dreams—everything conveniently labeled under the dual headings of _boys_ and _things I don’t have time for_. 

Explaining this would be unnecessarily cruel, he thinks, and his response is simple.

“Not really. Sorry.”

“Fourteen-year-old Matt is devastated.” Matt pauses. “And now?”

“What about now?” Mello asks, giving him a level stare.

“Well.” Matt smokes and avoids his gaze. “Probably be a bit of a disaster,” he mumbles, almost to himself. “The whole Kira thing… and you’re a lot more high maintenance than I’d go for normally, no offense… we’d be pretty good fuck buddies, though, don’t you think?” he says hopefully.

Everything slows way down. The space between beats of his heart seems to stretch on for longer than usual, as Mello narrows his eyes and stares down the man in front of him. Mello has always been very good at reading people, and he’s only gotten better—but he has a blind spot when it comes to Matt. He can admit that. Since they reunited, Mello has flipped between treating Matt like his friend from Wammy’s and treating him like an ordinary ally, and that was a stupid mistake. Matt has changed in the last four years, and he has always been extraordinary.

The fact that Mello recognizes the problem now doesn’t make it any easier to figure him out, though, and that is dangerous. His finger is on the trigger again. One wrong move, and this whole thing explodes, and Mello isn’t sure if he’ll be able to walk away this time.

“What’s the difference between fuck buddies and—anything else?” he asks haltingly, and almost winces. That was a bad thing to say. Adding sex to a dynamic this volatile is the surest way to fuck things up. But Matt beams and pushes himself off the wall.

“Oh, hang on, I’ve just had a _brilliant_ idea. Okay, all that shit I complained about before—the wanting to win and all that. Forget it. You keep doing all that crazy shit, and I’ll help you do it. But in exchange, you’re going to relax with me for one night. Just one night to be normal and average and boring.”

“And that would entail…?”

“First we turn off the speakers from the surveillance, because we can survive one night without them. Then we smoke some weed, order a lot of cheap food, and watch a shitty but hilarious movie. Then we fuck.”

“The sex will be average and boring, I suppose?” Mello says dryly, and Matt’s grin widens. He seems so enthusiastic, Mello can’t even bring himself to point out what a spectacularly bad idea this is.

“No, as a matter of fact it’s going to be really good sex, but it’s going to be fuck buddy sex, which is better because there’s none of that weird power play shit. And no trying to be sexy.”

“What does that even _mean_?”

“It means you don’t have to worry about people losing interest if you let loose for once. Like, you know—most people decide they want to fuck you because of a sexy attitude or an outfit or a look or whatever, but there’s always going to be someone else with the same look, yeah? So you’ve got to keep it up or else they might lose interest. But if you never try to be sexy in the first place, then the only attraction is you, and that’s not something that can be found anywhere else. Not to say people don’t lose interest _eventually_ , but for a while… it can be really nice.”

Mello considers this for a long moment. He tilts his head and deflects.

“You don’t think I’m sexy?”

Matt laughs, a low chuckle in the back of his throat. He grinds out his cigarette on the heel of his boot and strolls right up to Mello, so close Mello can taste the stale tinge of tobacco on his own lips.

“No, I do,” Matt murmurs. He leans forward and rests his hands on the couch, one on either side of Mello’s thighs, and drops his head. “I _definitely_ do. But it’s more fun this way. I promise.” Mello can feel the warmth of breath against his neck, the barest dry brush of lips as he speaks. “Come on, Mells. Give it a go.”

Mello looks up at the ceiling and tries to keep utterly still. No  slumping, no clearing his throat, no flinching away, no sobbing… nothing. He speaks only when he is sure he can speak in a casual voice.

“Weed, delivery, a bad movie, and fucking. That’s the deal?”

“That’s the deal.”

Matt kisses his neck.

“And tomorrow we go back to catching Kira.”

“Yep.”

“Let’s fuck first.”

He takes hold of Matt’s skull in both hands and yanks him up  for a kiss meant to show that there’s no going back—teeth clacking, prying Matt’s lips apart with his tongue. Matt inhales sharply—it’s not a displeased sound—and grabs Mello by the shoulders. There’s something wild about it, like they’re two boys trying to forget that they’re fighting for their lives, and white stars flash before Mello’s eyes. (He doesn’t remember closing them, but apparently he has.)

And then, mindful of their agreement, Mello softens. He relaxes his grip on Matt’s head and drapes his arms around his neck instead. Matt rests his hands on Mello’s waist and smiles into the kiss. Mello shivers. It’s—a very pleasant sensation. Lazy and intimate. He doesn’t kiss like this, normally, and it takes a real effort to keep from fucking it up.

For the first time, he indulges in a moment of speculation and wonders if this is what his first kiss could have been like. If his first kiss had been with Matt, when they were fourteen or fifteen. It probably wouldn’t have changed much, in the long run, but… it might have been nice.

“Mm, no,” Matt murmurs against Mello’s mouth. He doesn’t remember what they were talking about. “Weed first.”

Mello pulls a face.

“I don’t even like weed—the last time I tried it, all I got was dry mouth and paranoia.”

“You know why, babes? ’Cuz you’ve been getting your weed from crack dealers,” Matt says with a grin, tapping the tip of Mello’s nose. “You can’t trust the quality of weed you get from crack dealers, you need to go to a connoisseur. Like me.”

“Matt…”

“You promised.”

He did promise.

—

And so Mello takes a night off, for the first time in… a long time. Matt pulls out a small cigar box with several different bags of weed, all carefully labeled, and dithers over them for a bit before packing a small glass pipe in garish colors—purple with green stripes. Everything Matt owns is tacky.

It’s good weed, though. Mello doesn’t feel the effects at first, not until he realizes that he’s been thoroughly absorbed in cataloging the freckles on Matt’s cheeks. There are a lot more of them than there used to be, he thinks, and he reaches up to poke one. Matt catches his hand, and looks Mello in the eye as he peels off the leather gloves. His hands are very, very soft, and his lips are softer.

They kiss on the couch for a long time, and Mello thinks of the couch in the mafia’s base, that ugly zebra print thing. He has had sex on that, too, but this feels different. Back then, he intended to be seen, and now he feels… hidden. Private. Unseen, but in a good way. Matt straddles his lap and covers Mello’s entire body with his own, and spends a fair amount of time with his head buried in the crook of Mello’s neck, not looking at him.

Eventually Mello asks _why_ Matt is spending so much time on his neck, and Matt says “Because I like that noise you make.”

“What noise?” he asks. Matt doesn’t reply, but a few seconds later he sucks at one particular spot and this time Mello hears the quiet sound—a pleased little whimper—in the back of his own throat. “Oh.”

“Top or bottom?” Matt asks a while later. Time is expanding and contracting, and Mello has no idea how long they’ve been here.

“Mm… bottom,” he replies, because he doesn’t want to _move_ all that much, and Matt shakes with laughter and drops kisses all over his face.

“I knew you’d be a lazy bitch,” he says affectionately, and then he forces Mello to stand, against his protests, and drags him to the bedroom. “ _Whiny_ lazy bitch,” he amends.

Mello shoves him on the bed in retaliation—he hadn’t even known there _was_ a bed in this shitty apartment. Matt was here for surveillance, not sleeping. But it’s convenient, now, and some of his languor fades as they wrestle each other out of their clothes. Matt sheepishly reveals the fact that he had anticipated this outcome weeks ago—that he had the presence of mind, when robbing a pharmacy in order to stop Mello from dying, to procure not only morphine, gauze, iodine, and antibiotics, but lube and condoms. This is the funniest thing that Mello has ever heard, and he is only too happy when Matt begins to put them to good use.

If he were sober, Mello might be embarrassed by the intensity of his reactions. This is supposed to be fuck buddy sex, a fun addition to their friendship but nothing serious. It’s the weed’s fault, he thinks vaguely in the back of his mind, that all of his vocabulary has disappeared, that all of the lovely curses he usually relies on have been replaced by Matt’s name.

“Matt,” he gasps out as he squirms, trying to get a better angle on the fingers buried inside him. “ _Matt_ ,” at the first push of his cock. “Mattmatttmattmatt,” in a desperate plea as his orgasm builds and every muscle in his body constricts, back arching, legs tightening around Matt’s waist, neck bending so far back it might snap.

Matt seems to lose his words, too, or maybe they’ve just gotten mixed up.

“Fucking—beautiful—God—you—” he pants against Mello’s shoulder, and Mello digs his fingers into his back so tightly that he’s going to leave bruises, if not jagged red lines.

Afterwards, Mello lies flat on his back, eyes closed, trying to catch his breath, and Matt touches him gently. He starts by brushing stray hairs out of Mello’s face, and then tucking them behind his ears. With exquisite care, he traces the edge of the scar until it fades against his neck, where the burn was more minor and healed more cleanly. He drags the back of his fingers against Mello’s cheek and down over his lips.

Mello opens his eyes and turns his head to look at Matt. His eyes look weirdly small in his face, without the goggles. They’re blue—a pale, greenish blue, like rays of sunlight filtered through the surface of the water.

“Movie,” Mello says. “Food.”

“Yeah.” Matt gets out of bed and bends down to rustle through a duffle bag in the corner. “Pajamas,” he says, throwing a bundle of them at Mello, and he puts them on without protest. His skin feels oversensitive, and the raggedy plaid pants and Pac-Man t-shirt are undoubtedly more comfortable than anything he owns.

They relocate to the couch, and after some back-and-forth deliberation with himself, Matt starts _Starship Troopers_ on his laptop. He calls a pizza place to order a large pizza, chicken fingers, garlic twists, chocolate chip cookies, and a liter of soda, and then he packs another bowl. Mello smokes a little and tries to watch the movie, but his attention drifts. He ends up leaning against Matt’s side, with his head resting on his shoulder. At first he feels sleepy and he closes his eyes, but the sound effects from the movie and Matt’s laughter keep him awake. He doesn’t mind. It’s kind of nice to do nothing… to think nothing…

Suddenly he stirs.

“Hey,” he says, adjusting into a more comfortable position. He doesn’t open his eyes. “Do me a favor and don’t tell Near about that stuff from earlier, okay?”

Matt doesn’t respond right away, and Mello wonders if he heard or if he’s too absorbed in the movie. But then Matt starts shaking with silent laughter and it becomes clear that wasn’t the issue.

“Mello,” he manages. “Seriously? I don’t think Near and I have never had a one-on-one conversation. Do you really think I’m going to call up _your brother_ just to tell him we slept together?”

“Not that, pervert.” Mello pulls away far enough to punch Matt in the arm, and then drapes himself over him again. “I mean like… the stuff about when he and I were kids. About our mom. He doesn’t know.”

Matt considers this again.

“Like… how she died, or…?”

“Yeah, that. Any of that.” After a second of hesitation, Matt leans forward to pause the movie. “You can leave it on.”

“In a minute. Are you sure he doesn’t know? I mean—not to state the obvious, but Near’s a smart bloke. And he’s not _that_ much younger than you. If you knew, he might’ve known, too.”

“No,” Mello says simply. “No, he was… it was different then. He was more naive than he is now. You know, he was a _kid_. I spent more time out in the neighborhood by myself, so I knew addicts and I knew what was going on. But he didn’t like going outside without me, and she was always careful not to use in front of us. After she died, nobody wanted to explain an overdose to a five-year-old. He knew something wasn’t right about her, but I don’t think he’s ever put it together.”

“You said—” Matt bites his lip. “You said—it was morphine? Right?”

“Yeah,” Mello mumbles.

He had almost refused it, when Matt showed up at the church. In the end, he decided it would be all right. For all of his many character flaws, Mello doesn’t have an addictive personality. He drinks, but not often and almost never to excess. He will almost certainly end up using marijuana again, if Matt is willing to provide it, but he’s never felt the urge to seek it out on his own. Even when he was in the mafia—when cocaine was a matter of both business and pleasure for everyone around him—he’d only tried it a few times, when he was feeling particularly reckless and self-destructive. But he knew full well what he was doing, and it never became a habit.

And yet some part of him is still spooked by morphine. Some part of him worries that if Near is destined to take over their father’s legacy, then doesn’t it make sense that Mello is meant to inherit their mother’s?

Matt puts his arm around Mello and sort of pets his hair, and changes the subject.

“You must have been a really good brother, huh?”

“I guess,” Mello mumbles, shrugging one shoulder. “I taught him how to read. I taught him _everything_ ,” he adds, and anger flickers in his stomach again. “Then all of a sudden we get to Wammy’s and it’s like…”

He frowns and shakes his head. There is a knock on the door, and Matt gets up, pays the delivery guy, and comes back with a truly ridiculous amount of food. Mello’s stomach rumbles, and Matt prods him into a more upright position.

“Come on, eat. You’re skin and bones, you are.”

“Is that Hawaiian pizza?”

“The best America has to offer. Your people really need to discover tikka masala pizza, though. It’s about damn time.”

They start the movie again and eat without talking much. Mello isn’t all that interested in food, usually—he makes choices about his diet by calculating how many (non-chocolate) calories he needs, and by taking a lot of vitamins. But there is something to be said about the traditional method. Grease and cheese are _delicious_.

“You know, I always wondered why Near liked you so much,” Matt says out of the blue, as he snatches the last garlic twist right before Mello’s fingers can close around it. “You were kind of a prick to him.”

“He was a prick to me!”

“Well, yeah. But I always got the impression that you couldn’t stand him, and that he quite liked you. That’s how it’s supposed to go, with brothers, isn’t it? So it makes sense.”

“Do you have any siblings?” Mello asks, realizing suddenly that he knows absolutely nothing about Matt’s life before Wammy’s. Asking those sorts of questions wasn’t encouraged—really all he knows is that Matt grew up in Exeter, and that he was redirected to Wammy’s after a series of electronically-minded pranks that could have ended him up in legal trouble. He had been especially proud of rewiring the Galaga machine at a local arcade so that it gave free plays and that the lasers looked more like little penises. The owner hadn’t been able to fix it.

“Dunno,” Matt shrugs. “I grew up in foster care. Really nice families, as far as I can remember, and a couple of times they said to think of their kids like my very own brother or sister, but it wasn’t like—oh wait, shut up, this is my favorite line.”

 _“To defeat the bug,”_ a grim military official on the screen declares, _“we must understand the bug.”_ Matt snorts and takes a gulp of soda right from the bottle.

“So you never knew your birth family at all?” Mello presses.

“Nope.” For a moment Matt is still, staring at nothing, and then he shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. Family fucks you up.”

“Yeah,” Mello agrees. “Yeah, it does.”

They polish off most of the food and finish the movie. By the end, Mello is leaning against Matt again, not asleep but not particularly conscious, either. Matt offers to put on another movie, and when Mello declines, he takes out his handheld and starts playing. The sound effects make Mello oddly nostalgic—they make him think of Wammy’s.

It’s very late, and he’s more tired than he’s ever been in his life, but there’s one more question floating around in his mind.

“Matt,” he says around a yawn. “Do you think people who are alone are stronger?”

Matt ponders this for a minute.

“Depends, I guess. What do you mean by strong?”

“I don’t know,” Mello admits after a long pause, and he falls asleep before they reach a conclusion.

—

Mello wakes up with a crick in his neck. Matt slumped down at some point in the night, so Mello’s head is resting on his hip—it’s not the most comfortable position, and he sits up and stretches. He yawns and picks up the laptop he brought with him, with the bugs from Misa Amane’s hotel room.

“That quickly? But I have to pack all my things… Fiiiiine, Mochi, I’ll try. Is Light going to be on the same plane? Why not? But why didn’t he call me before he left—well, I guess that’s what happens when your boyfriend’s such a genius. He just works _so_ hard… yes, I promise!”

He’s still asleep. Asleep and dreaming. There’s no way—

“Matt,” he says in a voice like a croak. “Where’s the task force?”

“Hmfp?”

“Amane is going back to Japan. She thinks the task force has already left.”

“They what?” Matt sits up and rubs at his eyes. He blinks at Mello a couple of times, like an owl, and then turns his head and looks at the screen. “They… they must be…”

He picks up another laptop, this one playing video footage from the monitors. He rewinds at a speed that makes Mello’s head spin, but doesn’t see any of the task force leave—then suddenly he stops. There is a delivery truck blocking the entrance. It remains there for a long time, and just before it leaves, a bright blue airport shuttle pulls away and drives down the street.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Matt says in a horrified whisper, and he looks up at Mello like a deer in the headlights.

“You _idiot_.”

Mello leaps off the couch and strips on his way to the bedroom. He dresses hurriedly while Matt scrambles up and starts collecting his equipment.

“In my defense,” he calls. “The sex was really good.”

“Cherish the memory,” Mello snaps. “Because it happens again over Light Yagami’s dead body.”

Matt leans through the doorway—gloves and goggles in place, vest hanging off one arm, two sets of headphones clutched in one hand.

“You’re a kinky, whiny, lazy bitch,” he grins. “And I’ve got a massive crush on you.”

“Shut up,” Mello mutters, rolling his eyes. But he’s still smiling ten minutes later, when they’re packed and out the door and on their way to Tokyo.


	4. Chapter 4

They get lucky; they arrive at LAX just after Misa Amane, and are able to book the same flight as her and Mogi.

It’s a very uncomfortable flight for Mello. They book economy so they can avoid Amane and Mogi in first class, and board late so they can mingle in with the crowd. Mello wears sunglasses and slumps, and reminds Matt three times that if they had known about this ahead of time, they wouldn’t be taking this risk right now. The third time, Matt snaps and points out than anyone who would blow up a building while standing in it has no right to lecture others about managing risk.

But in the end, it’s all worthwhile. Because that very night, after they tail Mogi to the task force headquarters, someone steps out of the building that they haven’t seen before.

He’s accompanied by Aizawa, who looks as grumpy as ever and keeps flashing him suspicious looks. He is younger than any other member of the task force they’ve seen, no more than 25, and much better dressed, with a well-tailored suit and an expensive watch. He is handsome, with a sharp jaw and an easy smile. But when Aizawa turns away, something in his expression slips. There is a casual arrogance about him—a smirk beneath the smile, a certain gleam in his eye. Mello has absolutely no doubt who this is.

Light Yagami. Kira.

“You’re staring,” Matt mutters, kicking Mello in the ankle.

They’re sitting at the counter of a restaurant across the street from the task force building, and Mello isn’t just staring—he’s leaning forward, face inches from the glass window, and he can only imagine what his expression is like. He feels like a dog with the scent, straining at the leash. His gun is in his pocket, and he grips it so tightly he feels the grooves of the embossed pattern digging into his palm, even through the gloves.

“Let’s go.”

He stands abruptly, his chair skidding against the floor. Matt stands at the same moment, and grabs his forearm tightly.

“I’ll go. You stay here. And that is _exactly_ why,” he says when Mello turns on him with a murderous glare. “If you go, you’re going to shoot him.”

“And is that so bad?”

_He killed my father._

“It means you will lose because you let your emotions get the better of you,” Matt retorts immediately. “And Near will never, ever, ever let you forget it.”

Mello scowls at him, and then looks out the window. Light Yagami and Aizawa are getting into a car. There are taxis around, and it’s still possible to set up a tail, but they don’t have time to argue.

“Fine,” he snarls, yanking his arm back. “You text me every fifteen minutes. Got it?”

“Got it,” Matt says with a nod, and he slips out the door and hails a cab.

Mello sits back down, glaring alternately at the table and the window. No one else leaves the task force headquarters while he watches, and eventually the grumpy foreigner with the scar starts getting more curious looks than he would like. He gets up and circles the block, phone pinging with messages from Matt every quarter of an hour like clockwork.

 _still following_   
_pulled up @ a hotel. theyre checking in._   
_nothing yet_   
_still nothing_ _  
a LOT of cars just showed up—i think that woman from the news just got out of one. the new kira spokesperson._

Light Yagami is meeting with Kiyomi Takada? In front of Aizawa? Mello frowns. He has to know that Aizawa is suspicious of him….

 _Is Aizawa still there?_ he asks.

_y. i think they got 2 diff rooms tho. want me to go in?_

_No—if Takada is there, security must be crazy. Just keep watch from outside. Don’t get caught._

Matt continues to send him updates, but they don’t add up to much. Eventually Takada leaves with her retinue; Yagami and Aizawa leave thirty minutes later. It’s safe to say that’s not a coincidence.

The next day, Matt books a room in the hotel and brings some of his equipment with him. Mello stays behind, in an apartment across from task force headquarters that is technically under construction. (The landlord has been suitably bribed, so it will remain empty for a while.) He watches the news and notice Takada change her message—she asks Kira for orders, which seems odd. Isn’t Kira already giving her orders? Why should she be asking for them on behalf of the army and the police force—unless a police officer told her to?

A few hours later, he gets a text from Matt. _12th floor DEFINITELY bugged. too low tech for me to hack, and security is tight as fuck so i can’t get close enough to tap the signal. but it’s there_. And then, twenty minutes after that: _BUGS ALL DEACTIVATED_.

He checks out the next morning and returns to the apartment. On the nine o’clock news, Takada rolls back some of the more extreme positions she had announced just a few days previously.

“They’re talking through Takada,” Mello says, gaze fixed on the screen. There is that same arrogant gleam in her eyes. “We knew back in L.A. that Misa Amane wasn’t doing the killings, and Yagami probably can’t take that chance. Someone else has been doing them, and communication between them broke down. The—what are we up to now?—the fourth Kira picked Takada as a spokesperson. But why her…?”

“Because,” Matt says, spinning his laptop around. “Light Yagami and Kiyomi Takada were at Tokyo University at the same time. They had four classes together in their first two years and, given that he was the freshman representative and she won some sort of freshman popularity contest, they would have met at at least three major social occasions that I can find.”

“Sometimes you scare me, you know,” Mello comments without thinking, breaking off a piece of chocolate.

“Aw, thanks, babes. The feeling is mutual.”

“If Yagami already knew Takada, he could use that as an excuse to talk to her personally. The task force doesn’t trust him, so they would set up bugs, but last night he made up some ruse and disconnected them. He got in touch with the fourth Kira.”

“Or he just had a chance to talk to Takada alone, and told her to listen to him over the other Kira.”

“Either way, Yagami and the fourth Kira can get messages to each other easily, through Takada. Damn.” He shakes his head. “Five years ago it was L on a computer screen and Kira hiding somewhere among millions of people. And now—it’s _blatant_.”

But there is not much they can do in the days following except keep up the endless surveillance. Mello has his twenty-first birthday. He almost forgets, except Matt has bought him a motorcycle, so he doesn’t have to keep taking taxis and getting slowed down in traffic. The next day, Takada’s new bodyguards are announced on the news—among them a familiar face. Hal calls that very night, from a number Mello doesn’t recognize.

“I won’t be able to give you regular updates, but I wanted you to have this number just in case.” She pauses. “Actually, it was Near’s suggestion.”

“Of course it was.” The roses, the photograph, and now Hal. It’s getting a bit repetitive. “Listen, you’ll probably figure this out eventually, but Light Yagami has been meeting with Takada every night for the past week.”

There is a pause.

“You know?”

“I know.”

“And you’re sure they’re meeting with each other? Near guessed, but we haven’t been able to get confirmation…”

“Pretty sure. We can’t get eyes in the room, but he’s arrived at the hotel before her and left soon afterwards each night. Also, one day we were able to book a room, before Takada arrived, and confirmed that the SPK is bugging the meeting. Yagami took them out once, but he and Takada didn’t leave for almost an hour after that, so Takada knows about them. We think they got in contact with the current Kira during that time.”

“Yes, that’s what we thought… do you know if they have cameras? Or just wires?”

Mello looks at Matt and repeats the question.

“If they do, it has to be a film camera, because it wasn’t picked up on any of my equipment.”

“And the likelihood of that is…?”

“No, they don’t have cameras.”

Mello relays this.

“All right.” Hal lets out a huff of air, and there’s a faint scratching sound as she pushes a hand through her hair and some of it brushes against the speaker. “I’ll keep in touch as much as I can, if for no other reason than we’re going to crash into each other if we keep stumbling around independently. I doubt Near will let me tell you who is the current Kira, though, if we find them first. He told me not to give you Yagami’s name.”

“That would be cheating. I won’t tell you, either, unless it’s useful to me.”

“Understood.” For a moment, he thinks she’s going to hang up, but there is another moment of hesitation, and then she abruptly adds, “He’s in Tokyo, you know.”

“Near?”

“Yes. All of us are.”

“I’m not surprised. We all knew it was going to end in Japan.”

“I can give you the location of our base, if you want.”

“And why would I want that?” Mello asks.

It’s a rhetorical question, but as he waits for Hal to respond, he turns over the possibility in his mind. _Does_ he want to go see Near again? It would make the investigation easier, certainly, but in doing so he would have to abandon his independent efforts, and that grates on his pride. No, he’s not going to visit Near until Kira is finished.

But after? He hasn’t thought about. He never planned to meet Near again, but he never planned to abandon him forever, either. They will want to meet so that the winner can gloat properly, of course, and then the loser will need to nurse his wounds. And then… he doesn’t know. He has no idea what the future looks like. Matt has made suggestions, but none of them ring true to Mello. He can’t go back to the mafia. There is no more mafia to go to, in the United States, and the idea of starting at the bottom again is wearying. (Nor does he like the idea of what might happen if he and his brother became true adversaries, one fighting for the other’s downfall, rather than competing for the same prize.)

He can’t be L, but maybe he can still be something. Eraldo Coil and Deneuve were once real detectives whose interests and methods differed wildly from L’s. Maybe he can carve out his own niche in that world, and he and Near can be cordial, even if they will never be as close as they once were.

“I don’t know,” Hal says finally. “I thought you might be interested.”

Mello brushes her off, and she hangs up.

 _After_ , he thinks. _After this is over, I’ll ask._

—

The next few weeks pass by almost painfully slow. Matt spends much of his time watching old TV programs featuring Takada; eventually he spots someone he recognizes from Kira’s Kingdom broadcasts, and they identify Teru Mikami as a likely suspect for the fourth Kira. Hal confirms it the next time they get in contact with her.

“Gevanni is tailing him,” she says. “So please don’t approach Mikami without letting us know—if you’re going to set off another bomb, we’d like to get our agent out of the danger zone.”

But after that, there is very little that Mello can do. Takada and Light are under ridiculous security measures, and there is always the possibility that Mikami is being followed by a shinigami, which Matt can’t even detect, let alone interfere with. They talk over dozens of plans, but none that are actionable. The New Year co mes and goes. And then Hal calls and tells him that Near is meeting Light Yagami face-to-face in three days.

“Are you serious?” he asks, stunned.

“Yes.”

She tells him about Near’s plan—the notebook modified to serve as bait—but her voice is coming in at a weird pitch, and he has trouble hearing her.

This is it. It’s not a math test or a comprehensive exam or the right to claim a title. It’s their inheritance. Their birthright. The chance to avenge their father and to surpass him. Near is going to win.

Hal is still talking. Mello is thinking about walking across the street, pulling out his gun, and putting a bullet between Light Yagami’s eyes. Before he can decide, something occurs to him.

“How did you test the notebook?” he asks, cutting Hal off.

“What?”

“The notebook. The one you modified, how are you sure it’s real?”

“Gevanni saw Mikami use it once in public. There was a man harassing a woman on the subway, and Mikami wrote his name in the notebook—you know how he seems to have stricter rules than Yagami.”

 _Strict enough to kill a groper in public?_ Mello thinks. _Knowing that the existence of the notebook is widespread among investigators? No way. No way Light Yagami chose someone that stupid._ It’s a decoy notebook. It has to be. Mikami must have the real thing stashed away somewhere; it can’t be with Yagami or Takada, because neither of them have the shinigami eyes. Mikami is the only one who can bring the real notebook to the meeting, and see Near’s name, and—

“Hal, you have to test it,” he says urgently.

“We can’t.”

“If you don’t, if the notebook is fake—”

“It’s the real thing, Mello. We’re as sure as we can be, and the SPK can’t murder someone in order to catch a murderer. That’s not how we operate, and Near says it’s not how L operated, either.”

“L is dead,” Mello says in a cutting voice.

“Even so. This is the plan we’ve come up, that Near’s come up with, and we’re going to follow through.”

He is ready to argue—the words are on the tip of his tongue—when he freezes in place, clutching the phone, staring sightlessly out of the shaded window. A plan unfolds in front of him. It’s simple, really. Very simple. All that matters is the timing. It has to happen while Mikami is at work, because then it doesn’t matter where he’s hidden the Death Note. Whether it’s in his own home or somewhere else, he’ll have to go to it, and Gevanni will notice… and if he doesn’t, he doesn’t. Mello is wrong, and the modified Death Note is the real one.

But Mikami will wait. That much he’s sure of. He’ll wait, because Light Yagami was once desperate enough to persuade his own father to open a Death Note and write Mello’s name. He is afraid of Mello. Light Yagami wants Mello dead just as surely as Mello wants him dead.

He’s going to get what he wants.

“I guess it’ll have to be me…” Mello says lowly.

He is in the living room of the apartment, sitting in a chair across from Matt, who has been typing furiously on his computer. Now, though, his fingers still. He looks up, and there is a question in the flat amber plane of his eyes. Mello shakes his head minutely.

“What do you mean?” Hal says. Her voice is alert.

“Nothing. If we cross paths in the next few days, will you just—go along with it?”

“With what?”

“I’m not sure. I’m still figuring it out.”

“Mello, whatever your rivalry is with Near, you can _not_ fuck up his plan just to make him lose. Do you understand me? I know I said I wasn’t taking sides, but if you intentionally stop him from catching Kira—”

“I won’t,” Mello interrupts. “I have an idea, but it won’t interfere with Near’s plan.”

“Promise me. On the cross, promise me.”

Mello takes hold of the crucifix on his chest.

“I promise. And you’ll go along with it?”

“Within reason. Yes.”

“Thank you. Hal, you’re—the SPK—you are keeping him safe, aren’t you?”

“Of course we are.”

“You’ll protect him?”

“It’s the real notebook, Mello.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

“Yes. We’ll protect him.”

“Good.”

Mello hangs up and sets the phone on the table in front of him. On autopilot, he takes a bar of chocolate from his pocket—but there is a bitter taste in his mouth, and he doesn’t want to eat anything. He puts that down, too.

“What is Hal going along with?” Matt asks.

Mello looks at him thoughtfully.

“Do you want a blowjob?” he offers. “You can touch me all you like.”

He can see Matt’s eyebrows rise, beneath his hair.

“I thought that was on hold until after we finished this thing.”

“I know.” But I don’t think I’m going to have another chance. “But I have a crazy plan, and I think you’ll like what I have to say better if I blow you first.”

Matt laughs and agrees, and unbuckles his jeans. He kisses Mello, before they get started—there is a little obscene curl of his tongue that makes Mello shiver, and then he closes his eyes and sucks him.

It feels different than before. He can’t get inside his head the way he usually does; he’s stuck in his body, entirely focused on the stretch of his lips, the taste on his tongue, the heat in his veins, the hands carding through his hair…. It’s different for Matt, too, he can tell. Before, his response was almost wordless, but now he talks constantly.

“God, Mells,” he groans. “You’re so good at this… fuck… and so goddamn pretty, look at you…”

He’d be lying if he said he didn’t enjoy that.

Mello does his best. He speeds up and slows down. He plays with the tip, and pulls off to lavish kisses to Matt’s inner thigh. He moans and makes intense eye contact and bats his goddamn eyelashes. Better make it count, right? When Matt reaches orgasm, he swallows, and pulls back just a little too early on purpose. He wipes the last bit of cum off his chin with his thumb and licks it. Matt lets his head roll back with a groan.

“ _Stop_ it.”

“I’m done,” Mello says with a half smile.

He climbs into Matt’s lap and kisses him. He kisses like he’s dying—which he absolutely is, faster now than ever before. He takes Matt’s head in both hands and plunders his mouth and revels in the warmth and surety of Matt’s hands, running up and down his shoulders. The whole world has shrunk to the circle of Matt’s arms, and he wants to stay there for as long as he can.

Mello is breathing heavily when he pulls away, and he touches their foreheads together and says “We’re going to kidnap Kiyomi Takada.”

“You’re taking the piss,” Matt responds promptly.

“No.”

“Mells, she’s the most heavily guarded woman in Japan. Maybe the world.”

“And one of her bodyguards is going along with it.” He touches his lips to Matt’s again and wraps his arms around his neck. “You’re going to draw off some of her guards with a smokescreen. I’ll swoop in and take Takada on the bike—Hal will make sure she goes. I’ll be able to maneuver more easily, and as long as half of the guards are diverted, I should be able to evade them.”

“Then what?” Matt frowns. “Why bother?”

“Near has swapped pages of the Death Note for fakes. He thinks Mikami will come to the meeting with the task force and write down the names of the SPK. They’ll catch him red-handed, and they won’t die because they modified the notebook—but I think it was a decoy. We need to draw out Mikami with the real notebook. I say there’s a fifty percent chance he kills her as soon as we take her, just in case she gives anything up. If not, I try to ransom her for the notebook. Yagami killed Director Takimura last time—he’ll order the same for Takada.”

Matt doesn’t even bat an eye at that, for which he is grateful.

“That seems… risky.”

“I know.” Mello kisses him again and runs his hands up Matt’s chest. “Don’t you trust me?”

Matt’s expression softens, and he reaches up to brush a lock of hair out of Mello’s face.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I…”

Something in his expression flickers, and for a moment Mello thinks that he might be about to say—something else. Terror seizes him, and his fingers clench involuntarily in the fabric of Matt’s shirt. _Don’t say it_ , he thinks. _If you say it, I might have to tell you the truth_. Matt sighs wistfully.

“I trust you,” he says with a gentle smile.

Relief courses through him.

“We’re so close, Matt,” he says. “So close.”

—

They hammer out the details for a while, even though Mello knows most of them don’t matter. They fuck—up against the wall, first, because Mello just can’t stand to wait any longer, and then on the bed. It’s different sober. Faster and more desperate, although maybe that was inevitable. Afterwards they lie beside one another, passing a cigarette back and forth, talking about anything but the case. Wammy’s, mostly. A little bit about the time they spent apart. Eventually Matt yawns and says “we should get some rest,” and Mello agrees.

But he lies awake for a long time that night, flat on his back, staring at the ceiling. He’s thinking of the numbers and letters floating above his head, visible only with the shinigami eyes. Mihael Keehl, 502209.

A lifetime ago, Rod Ross had asked Jack to tell him the real names and lifespans of everyone in the mafia, except for himself and Mello. He lost interest once he realized the numbers were impossible to interpret, but Mello had been curious. He asked Jack for his own, too, and had sat down to try and break the code. It was the first purely intellectual challenge he’d worked on since Wammy’s, and he had appreciated the difficulty. What kind of cypher did he need? What unit was time measured in—was it a unit that made sense in the human world? Did the numbers even mean the same thing to shinigami, or were they just scribbles Jack interpreted wrongly?

It would be helpful, he thought, if he could get a bigger sample size. The problem with the mafia was that people’s lifespans were _wildly_ unpredictable. If he could compare the lifespans of—say—children and death row inmates or terminally ill patients, he would be able to make some broad estimates, at least.

He never cracked it, in the end. Other things took precedence. He remembers his own number, though.

Speculation is useless, but he can’t help but wonder. How much time does he have left? 502209 doesn’t take into account murder by Death Note—in theory, how much longer could he live? A year, ten years… thirty… sixty?

He turns his head to the side and stares at the back of Matt’s head. God, what would he do with another sixty years? It just seems so—improbable. That’s as long as both of his parents put together. No, he probably never had a shot at the average life expectancy. He’s too good at fucking himself up.

 _Near has a chance_ , a voice whispers in his mind, and he finds the thought comforting. Yes. If any of them are going to make it, it’s Near. Because Near has never been alone. Near has been coddled and protected since he was born, first by Mello, then by the staff at Wammy’s, now by his own team. And with the exception of this latest scheme, he has never taken a stupid risk in his life; the family propensity for self-destruction seems to have skipped him.

Near is in a class all his own. The only real threat to him is Kira—and together, Mello and Near are going to take him down.

That’s an even more pleasant thought. Mello curls closer to Matt’s body, and closes his eyes, and pictures the numbers in Light Yagami’s lifespan counting down, down, down….

—

The next day, Mello and Matt ride the motorcycle to the largest parking lot they can find and wander around for a while. Matt is picky; he dismisses several good options because they’re “just not _fast_ enough, it’s a safety issue Mello,” and ends up picking a red Camaro. Mello didn’t even know they sold Camaros in Japan.

“We’re not doing this so you can collect more toys,” he says when Matt spends a little too long running his hands lovingly over the hood instead of actually hot-wiring the car.

“Oi, you got yours. It won’t take a minute.” He gets in the driver’s seat and, in fact, has the engine rumbling in under sixty seconds. “Done,” he declares with a satisfied smile. He rolls down the window and shuts the door, and Mello’s heart begins to pound. They’re really doing this.

“Hey.”

He leans into the open window, resting on his elbows, and Matt looks at him expectantly. But he can’t find the words.

He can’t say goodbye. If he says goodbye, Matt will figure it out, and this whole thing falls apart if Matt figures it out. He can’t bring himself to go over the plan one more time, because as far as last words go, those would be pretty pathetic. And he can’t make promises, even ones that will make Matt laugh now, like _as soon as we finish this I swear we’ll finally go to that stupid giant arcade you’ve been salivating over_ , because later those are going to be painful.

Matt is still waiting. _You have the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen_ , Mello thinks, _and I love your stupid freckles_.

He doesn’t say this. He turns his head and softly kisses Matt’s stupid freckled cheek, and lingers for a moment.

“Careful, babes,” Matt says with a dopey grin when he stands up straight. “You’re getting sentimental.”

“Never.” He takes a deep breath. “See you at the finish line?”

“You know it.”

Matt holds out a fist and they tap, top and bottom, then Mello steps back and the car speeds away. Mello stares after it for a moment, helmet propped against his waist, and then he looks down to find that the fingers of his left hand are absently playing with the beads on his right wrist. The rosary is the only link he has to his parents, really. The only thing from his old life he has kept…

Well. That and his brother. Mello closes his eyes.

“I believe,” he murmurs, with more conviction than he has ever felt before. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into hell; on the third day He rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from there He will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.”

He crosses himself and puts his helmet on. As he starts the motorcycle, his last thought is that he should have left a letter for Near, like the one L sent them. For all the time he has spent brooding over that one passage, parts of it were a comfort. _I suppose this is my way of showing that I love you, no matter how inadequate that may be_. With the way things have gone between them lately, Near might need some reassurance.

But it’s too late, he thinks as he zips out onto the main road. It’s too late, and in the end it doesn’t matter. Near knows.

—

The kidnapping goes off without a hitch. Mello appears on the scene just as Matt is peeling away, and Hal tells Takada to get on the bike without hesitation. He’s a little surprised that Takada obeys, to be honest—she must know SPK has an agent among her bodyguards. Or perhaps Kira thinks she’s just that disposable, and never bothered to tell her.

They get to the truck yard without anyone noticing them, and Mello gets Takada into the back and has her strip. He remembers to make sure she takes off her shoes. She asks for the blanket before removing her underwear, and Mello stares at her for a long moment. Is this feminine modesty, or…?

Maybe he should say no. Maybe this plan will work even if she doesn’t—no. No, that’s a risk he can’t take.

“Fine,” he says, tossing the blanket to her. “Hurry up.”

He goes through the rest of the movements mechanically. Donning the disguise. Discarding Takada’s clothes. Changing back into his own. Driving. There is a small TV in the cab, and when he turns it on, he sees a red car riddled with bullets. _The man who was shot down still has not been identified_ , a news anchor says.

Grief does not tear through him, the way it did when his parents died. That would be more than he could bear, right now. The dull shock that lodges like a stone in his gut is bad enough. He doesn’t have the energy to cry.

_Matt, I never thought that you would be killed… I’m sorry…_

He drives for a long time, and wonders where he’s going. He had a plan—a warehouse in Nagano where they won’t be interrupted. But it’s such an ugly place, and now he doesn’t think he wants to go there. He stays on the highway until he sees a cross rising from the horizon. When he takes the next exit, he finds an old, crumbling stone church, long abandoned, tucked away in a little wood. Yes, that’s perfect. It reminds him of the mission in L.A., and the chapel at Wammy’s. The walls are so degraded that he can drive right into the sanctuary.

He turns off the engine and waits. His fingers pick idly at the rosary on his wrist, spinning it around and around. There are prayers. He knows their names. He should know the words, too, but he can’t—he can’t quite remember. His mind is stuck on two sentences, turning them over and over and over again. _Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night._ But that’s not scripture. Where did he learn that…?

There is a fist in Mello’s chest, squeezing his heart in an iron grip. He gasps. _This is how my father died_ , he thinks with a sudden clarity. It hurts—God, it _hurts_. He never expected it to hurt this much. Morphine would have been an easier way… so much more gentle…. He can’t breathe. He collapses onto the steering wheel.

In the distance, he hears the echo of church bells and a baby’s wail. Everything is blue and blinding white, and he’s staring down at his brother, touching his warm wet cheek… the baby stops crying, and looks back at Mello with those impossibly black eyes… he reaches up—reaches—

**Author's Note:**

>  _In its shadow form, the reversed Strength card can signal that you are prone to explosive behaviour, lashing out at others and becoming aggressive... It’s normal for feelings such as anger, rage, sadness, guilt or shame to arise in certain situations. However, it’s what you do with these emotions that makes all the difference. Now is a time when you need to be conscious of your instinctual urges and bring them into balance with the greater good._  
>  ([source](https://www.biddytarot.com/tarot-card-meanings/major-arcana/strength/))


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